something queer going on

An article about ways to effectively resist: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/. It's a very sober, measured set of suggestions, based in real experiences of resistance.

I've been sleeping badly for a couple of months (sleeping restlessly and waking up too early) and for the last week or so, having persistent back pain.

So yesterday I finally remembered the stash of muscle relaxants that I still have from my bout with sciatica last winter. Took a cyclobenzaprine at bedtime, slept for nine hours, took a four hour nap this afternoon, and I feel almost human again. Plus my back barely hurts. Thank you, Big Pharma!

I'm going to take another one tonight, and hope that two solid nights of sleep will reset me to sleep normally.


Unrelated, a thing that will only make sense if you're on Twitter: I just had occasion to recall a time when somebody posted on Twitter about how bookstore customers should take politically-bad books and hide them elsewhere in the store. And I responded that this only hurts bookstore workers and isn't actually a politically radical act.

I got told that this was the moral equivalent of Eichmann's "just following orders."

(Okay, a brief primer: there is Discourse happening right now, because a disabled trans person who can sometimes be very irritating about social justice* got doxxed by actual fascists and was revealed to work [part time, as an admin, because he needs health insurance] for Lockheed-Martin. Cue a whole bunch of "leftists," many of whom are neither disabled nor trans, gleefully calling him a collaborator, a murderer, and comparing him to secretarial staff in a concentration camp. Also trotting this out for anyone defending him in any way whatsoever, including just pointing out that a weapons-making corporation is still not a concentration camp.

*And who's been the target of transphobes for a while, at least since he did a big thread about the transphobia and racism and general awfulness of That One Book Where Everyone With A Y Chromosome Dies and Is Sent to Literal Hell.

If you're not on Twitter and this is the first you're hearing of the whole mess, be glad.)


In cheerier news, my story is really truly almost done. I'm halfway through the final edit. Will probably post it tomorrow.

Medical billing is an obscure and arcane branch of sorcery, y/y? Certainly it involves trafficking with the eldritch horrors that are insurance companies.

This post brought to you by the fact that I got my prescriptions delivered just now, and it looked to me like I had been billed $508.87 for the testosterone prescription that last month cost me about $22. This change was due, apparently, to the fact that my insurance company has finally started covering this prescription. Naturally, this should lead to my paying $500, right? I guess that's how insurance works?

One angry phone call to my pharmacy later, it turns out that I have not been billed $500. It . . . has to do with co-pays, and how my insurance covers prescriptions, and apparently my insurance company wants me to pay $500, but the pharmacy is waiving all but $22 of that but this will still cause a credit of $500 to go towards my deductible . . . ? I guess . . . ? Anyway, I don't owe anybody $500 for one month's worth of testosterone. I guess.

I feel shaky and tearful, and also guilty for being so angry on the phone before I understood. The folks at the pharmacy have always done their best for me, which is part of the reason why it was such a shock.


Explanatory thingy for those blessed people not in the US who don't have to deal with this shit: so, we lucky, free Americans who have health insurance pay towards it every month. I am lucky in having generally extremely good insurance* through my job, so I pay less than $100 per month; others pay hundreds or even thousands monthly, if they can afford it at all. [*Generally really good except that they want to discriminate against trans people even though that's illegal in my state.]

So, having paid your monthly bill, all your medical expenses are covered, right? Not so fast. Nope. First, health insurance has a deductible, which is the amount you have to pay before insurance will cover anything*. In my case, because I have insurance that I've literally heard an insurance broker express envy of, my deductible is $500. For those with less enviable, but still normal, insurance, it's $5000 or more. [*Except certain kinds of routine visits, and some prescriptions, and . . . it's all really fucking confusing, okay?]

So, once you've paid the deductible, you're good, right? Nope. After the deductible, the insurance will pay a certain percentage of the bill, but you keep paying the rest, until you've reached your out-of-pocket limit. This and the deductible are annual, and reset every year. My out of pocket limit is $1500, +$500 deductible = $2000 yearly. That's the most I will ever have to pay.

Except for the co-pays, of course. Insured people still have to pay a fee, typically around $20 to $30 but sometimes more, to see a health care provider. There's also a co-pay on prescription medicines. Mine is supposed to be $10, or $20 for certain less common drugs, but in practice it seems to vary widely. Sometimes it's $0, sometimes apparently it's $500.

Gibbering in cosmic terror yet? I haven't even mentioned the whole "in network vs. out of network providers" thing (basically, you pay a fuckton more if you make the mistake of going to a provider who doesn't have a contract with your specific insurance company). There are horror stories of people getting hit with huge bills after surgery because the anaesthesiologist, who is generally assigned by rota that individual patients have no say in, turns out not to be in their network. I also haven't mentioned separate deductibles and co-pays. My insurance, which let me reiterate is really good, has a completely separate system of deductibles and co-pays for physical therapy, and also I believe a separate one for MRIs. Both of these things have deterred me from seeking treatment for what's probably a rotator cuff injury in my left shoulder.

Some insurance plans also have coverage maximums. If you hit that maximum, well, good luck to you! They won't pay any more towards your cancer treatment or your catastrophic brain injury that year.

And this is the system that many Americans, not all of them right-wing politicians, insist is the best in the world.

The last few days have not been good, emotionally.

Work related badness (including attempted violence not directed at me) under the cut. ( Click here )

The other thing is that Rusty Quill, which has been a huge source of comfort to me over the past few months, is not quite as comforting as it was. More under the cut. ( Click here. )

I am fighting the urge to reply to Katie Hinde's article about how she struck a blow for feminism by moving some shirts from the boys' section to the girls' section. Apparently people on Twitter have already said everything I would say.

So . . . I'll say it here, I guess, if only to vent.

Moving stuff around in a store is not activism. It doesn't change anyone's mind about anything, and it has no effect whatsoever on corporate policies. What it does is make life harder for retail workers, whose work lives are already hard enough due to low wages, corporate policies that ensure there are few full-time retail jobs, overwork due to low staffing, and customer behavior ranging from the careless (drop something on the floor and leave it there) to the outright abusive.

During 2016 I worked in a store that sold books (among other things) and I can't tell you how often I had to find books by or about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump that some fucking retail activist had hidden and return them to their correct places. How often I had to turn books face out that had been deliberately turned face in. How often I had to write off books that had been deliberately damaged, costing the company money and resulting ultimately in fewer hours and lower wages, because the first thing retail corporations do when profits go down is to cut labor.

Eventually I put up a sign asking people to knock it off. It might have helped a little; I don't know. But I do know that if any of the folks moving or destroying books For Great Justice had contacted corporate about some perceived bias (and there probably was a bias--we stocked many, many more conservative books than liberal ones*), it would have had more impact than what they actually did, which was make my job harder and more frustrating, full stop. Their actions affected no one but me and other workers. Certainly the CEO never knew it was happening.

(*And I tried to subvert that bias, in a small way, by facing out a lot more left-liberal books than conservative ones, making them more noticeable. But I didn't move anything to the wrong fucking place.)

I mean, seriously, the behavior of Hinde and others like her is not even armchair activism. It's just being a self-congratulatory bourgeois ass while directly contributing to the shitty situation--the oppression--of working class people.



/I work retail, hear me rage

In May there will be a vote in my city on a proposed tax on soda and sugary drinks; the tax amount will be $.02 per fluid ounce, raising the price of a 12 oz can by 24 cents and a 2-liter bottle by about $1.28. The money raised is supposed to go to improve access to pre-kindergarten education.

I'm not often on the fence, politically, but I am about this.


Pro: Pre-K education is a good thing and poor children should receive it.

Con: All sales taxes are regressive, because poor people spend more of their income on goods than rich people do. Therefore it will hit poor people harder. It might have an extra dose of regressiveness, too, because I suspect (although I have no numbers) that poor and working class people are more likely to drink soda than middle-class people, and so the people most in favor of the tax (i.e. middle class people) are likely to pay a lot less of it.

Pro: Soda and other sugared drinks are not a necessity. If people drink fewer sugared drink because of the tax, that could even be a good thing.

Con: The "pro" point above has a strong element of food policing, which I hate. And it's a highly class-inflected food policing, too; nobody has proposed a special tax on expensive triple-cream cheeses or foie gras. This tax is, in part, about making poor people behave in the way middle class people think they should.

Pro: The main force behind opposition to the tax is the beverage industry, which is trying to create panic over (probably spurious) job losses and so on. This makes me want to vote for the tax just to hurt the corporations.

Con: On the other hand, I want to vote against it to spite the sanctimonious hippies, food police, and obesity panic-mongerers. I recognize that this isn't the moral equivalent of voting against corporate interests, but I feel it nevertheless.


Unanswered questions: How much money will the tax actually raise (the city projects $7 million per year)? How much will that amount of money actually improve pre-K access? Why has nobody proposed, say, a property tax increase on houses worth over $300,000 as an alternative that would shift the financial burden to the well off?


Anybody have thoughts?

N.B.: Given the nature of the post, I will accept reasoned comments about potential health impacts. My definition of "reasoned" includes, "You have given some thought to why it's problematic to try to dictate what other people eat." I will delete the hell out of concern trolling, fat-shaming, etc.

Has anybody seen hard data on whether, and to what degree, low-income white voters went for Trump? I've found lots of statistics broken down by race, education, income, etc., and some combined data (race + education or race + sex), but I haven't seen race + income anywhere.

The stereotype is that Trump's base was poor and working class whites, but other statistics do not seem to bear this out: a significant majority of people with incomes under $50,000 voted for Clinton. But I'd like to see those numbers broken down by race. (There's also a weird demographic twist where the less education a voter--especially a white voter--had, the more like s/he was to vote Trump. But the income figures are basically the opposite, and I'm wondering who all these less-educated rich people are.)

I was stumped for something to say about Veterans Day/Remembrance Day/Armistice Day. It's strange, I spend a lot of my time learning about the world wars and normally I can hardly be made to shut up about them. But today brings me in mind of the dead, as it should, and in the face of so much death it's hard to say anything.

About 17 million people were killed in the First World War, a total that includes civilians, and also those soldiers who died in the influenza pandemic before the war ended. About 60 million people were killed in the Second World War, including the roughly 10 million murdered in the Holocaust.

With that on my mind, I went to Google to look up something unrelated and I was confronted by this graphic: ( under the cut )

Buying organic: companies are not always as progressive as one might hope.

Several media sources have called the election for Obama.