Bulletins and News Discussion from September 2nd to September 8th, 2024 - We Love Our Trans Comrades - Chemicals of the Week: Estrogen and Testosterone

Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.

Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:

We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.

The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:

Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!

The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.

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France has raided the home of and arrested Imane Maarifi, a French nurse who returned from working in Gaza and has been speaking out at protests and the media about the situation there. She's supposedly charged with the crime of making public insults in relation to an Israeli investment and real estate fair being held in Paris this weekend.
- We must defend le democracy
  
  The only democracy in the lands of the Gauls.
- an Israeli investment and real estate fair being held in Paris this weekend.
  I assume this is one of those events where they talk about potentially buying stolen land in Gaza and the West Bank, no?
  
  Yes, exactly. With a few other broader invest in Israel things too, but predominently, yes.
- Ahh, yes, the crime of making public insults.
  
  If you think that's absurd you should see the UK's constantly used Public Order Act which makes it a crime to engage in actions that "may cause a nuisance or offend someone".
  Do they have to actually do either of those things? No. Do the police need to provide an example of someone who was offended or 'nuisanced'? No.
  It's literally a law that makes literally anything the police would like a crime, while also being grounds for preventing protest and using stop and search powers.
  
  Word. The UK is such a fucked up excuse for a state. ASBOs alone should be enough to have people up in arms
  
  They were locally. And then the right wing press got hold and decided it was a safety / political correctness issue gone mad and it instakilled genuine normal person's gripes against it.
  Cut to twenty-five years later and a friend who wrote a book a decade ago got stopped for wearing a tee shirt with the title on it two years ago.
  And obviously that isn't anything compared to the people they really weaponised this shit against even then, but that was a because a copper didn't like it in a small historic market town.

1341 comments