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Amira

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Everything posted by Amira

  1. I found the boards in August of 2003 and have been here every day since then.
  2. Prairiewindmomma’s experience doesn’t sound unusual to me. I often hear women thank men for the opportunity to speak (men will say this too, but by definition, women are never in a position to assign speakers in our main church service, so it comes across differently to me). Even though I always wear pants to church, the vast majority of women do not and I still get comments about my slacks. Women missionaries and wives of general church leaders are still not allowed to wear slacks to church. Women talk about their love for their husbands and children all the time. Many stories about women connect them to husbands and children. I just sat through a women’s meeting where love of husbands and children came up often. “Primary voice,” which is not about tone but rather style of presentation, is a real thing. The videos above show the difference. But it is also true that women are punished everywhere for using their natural voices. I don’t think that women should have to learn to speak in certain ways simply to get men to take them seriously. We should use our natural voices to speak and others should take us seriously, but we should also not adopt certain tones of voice in order to come across as subservient or sweet or nice.
  3. I have a Bosch mixer that I use regularly for bread (I mix four loaves of 100% whole wheat bread at a time, so it's a lot of dough). In 11 years, I've had it move around one time. I wonder if there's something off kilter with yours? Because mine would be happy on a shelf (which I didn't even know existed before this thread).
  4. If I could choose anywhere in the world, then Tashkent, Istanbul, and Jerusalem are my top three cities. If I had to limit my choices to the US, I might go with something near the coast in Maine or Oregon or Alaska. I'd live in lots of places for a year or two, like Asheville, NC, or Worcester, Massachusetts.
  5. Thank you for posting about this.
  6. We have two and dh and ds have been using them to commute to school and work for the last 18 months. We're definitely fans. I used ds's for about a month when his elbow was broken and liked it too, although I'm more of a walker. They mostly use bike trails, although ds has to bike along regular roads without a bike lane for a bit. They'll both be sad when we move and biking to work and school isn't an option anymore. I can't think of any tips beyond obvious things like get a really good bike lock and regular bike safety stuff.
  7. It's about slavery in that part of North Carolina in the 1800s.
  8. But there already is a sharkey sting ray! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhina_ancylostoma
  9. Yeah, that's how I'd really like to refer to them. Maybe I can find a map of the state that labels that area the Piedmont and find a different map that focuses on the Piedmont to show the specific counties and cities I'm talking about. Thank you!
  10. I'm working on a paper where I'm writing quite a bit about Rowan, Randolph, Cabarrus, Iredell, Davie, Davidson, Catawba, and Mecklenburg counties. Would you consider those counties (as a group) to be in central North Carolina? Western North Carolina? Something else? I'd like to refer to them accurately according to local usage.
  11. People are experiencing this differently depending on their environments. It is certainly not the case that kids everywhere are being told they’re trans if they don’t appear to be following gender stereotypes (edited to add that they're especially not being told they're trans as if being trans were a negative thing). Some kids in all different kinds of environments are trans, but most are not. I do not see the correlation you’re describing here because I think (a) is not an accurate representation of reality for many kids. On a separate note, I am very sorry your kids are dealing with people questioning their identity. That’s not okay.
  12. I have seen dramatically different responses to clothing and hairstyles that are perceived to be non-gender-conforming in various places we have lived in the last 10 or so years (several different countries, a conservative US location, and a liberal US location). In my experience, the environments that are more open to people being trans are *much* less likely to enforce or encourage gender-conforming dress and hairstyles than environments that are leery of trans identity. I am so glad that we are in a more liberal environment now because my adult trans family member isn't harassed or misgendered and my cis teenager can wear whatever he wants to school and try out longer hairstyles if he wants to. I can wear pants in a traditional dresses-only-for-women space with far less comment here than in a more conservative area. There's always social pressure to conform, but for me, it feels very different depending on where we live. I've seen no evidence of an extensive trans movement that is trying to enforce gender stereotypes on anyone.
  13. I would still recommend the NMAAHC. Like all the Smithsonians, there's far more to see than you can do in one day, so you could easily spend time on the upper levels where culture is highlighted if you're concerned that the lower levels about history wouldn't work for your dd. The upper levels also have the advantage of being much less crowded if you're there on a busy day.
  14. I do not think that setting the bar at being literally arrested or having to retain counsel is a reasonable representation of harm. I mean, going back to my Saudi Arabia example, I didn't particularly worry that I would be arrested if I went entered a men-only space. When I did do that, usually someone politely told me that I was in the wrong place and was supposed to leave. Sounds like not a big deal, right? But the more it happened, the more I self-regulated until I wasn't even trying to do a lot of things I would normally have done in any other country because simply existing as female in Saudi (even a foreign, white woman) meant that I had to watch my actions in so many ways that men did not. It wasn't just about where I could eat. And it's not just about arrest. It's so much more than that. I get that women want to feel safe in the bathroom. I do too, and I have to pay attention to that in different ways. Women and public bathrooms have a long and complicated history everywhere in the world. Keeping people from using public bathrooms, whether it's through social pressure or fear of arrest, severely limits people.
  15. My favorite trans person was able to change her birth certificate in a state working toward bathroom laws. We fly through that state often. The way that proposed laws are written, I'm pretty sure she won't be able to legally use the bathroom in the airport unless she finds a single stall bathroom that isn't gender designated. It doesn't seem so very different from when I lived in Saudi Arabia and I was banned from eating in a large number of restaurants because they didn't have a family section - they mostly catered to men and it was too expensive to create a section for women. I was constantly aware of not being welcome in many spaces, and now she is experiencing that in the US.
  16. There's no loss to whey (unless you drain the finished product, in which case you choose how much whey to drain off), so if you start with a half gallon of milk, you'll get a half gallon of yogurt. I don't use a thermometer, but you'll need to watch the milk when it's heating. I personally use an instant pot to heat the milk (and a crockpot before that), just to not have to babysit the milk, but I've done it on the stove many, many times. Heat the milk on the stove till it's just starting to boil/rise, then turn off the heat immediately if you have a gas stove or remove it from the heat if you have electric to make sure it doesn't boil over. Let the milk cool till it's warm but not hot to the touch. The exact temperature is flexible. I use a freeze-dried starter for an initial batch, then I use my own yogurt after that. Pour your milk into whatever container where you'll incubate it, and add your starter or yogurt to the warm milk. Stir well and incubate till it's set. I like tangy yogurt so I incubate it for 12 hours. Put it in the fridge and it will continue to firm up The milk needs to stay warm during incubation. I've wrapped towels around a plastic container if that's all I have and leave it in the warmest spot in the house. I usually use a 2-liter yogurt incubator though. If you can get good yogurt at that price, then it might not be worth making, depending on how much your milk costs. I have never found a store-bought yogurt that I like as much as my homemade yogurt, plus it's always cheaper for me to make it. The best yogurt I've made was from my neighbor's cow in a little town in Kyrgyzstan.
  17. Yogurt is all I do consistently, and I've been making that for 22 years. We eat a lot of yogurt.
  18. I don't think that it's possible to fix things at the border without making some pretty big systemic changes to US immigration law and also to US foreign policy. That would probably be too political for a main board discussion though. But in my opinion, the problem is not the people at the border. Their difficulties are a symptom of many other broken systems around the world. I do think it's important to realize that there have been some pretty significant, very recent changes in who is coming to the southern US border and how they got there. I think that most US Americans assume that Mexicans and Central Americans make up the vast majority of people trying to cross the border or to claim asylum, but but for the first time ever, Mexicans and Central Americans were a slight minority last year. And the actual number who arrived from Central America and Mexico was lower than in previous years. Instead, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people arriving from other countries, especially Venezuela. In my personal experience, I am meeting more and more Afghans who crossed the southern border to claim asylum. Since asylum seekers can only claim asylum in person, the southern border is often their only option because it's hard to get a visa for the US or Canada.
  19. It has not been resolved. DHS filed additional information with the SC hours before these people died. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23A607/295564/20240112012220571_23a607 DHS v TX supplement.pdf
  20. There's also the question of what and when Texas knew about drowning people and whether they did anything to help. This statement doesn't address that at all.
  21. The statement is carefully worded. It leaves out the fact that the Texas National Guard took control of Shelby Park several days before this incident occurred and refused to allow CBP to patrol the area, including the water. So yes, it may well be true that the woman and children had already drowned when CBP requested access regarding this specific incident, but they should not have been barred from this area in the first place. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-blocks-federal-border-agents-processing-migrants-eagle-pass-shelby-park/ I cannot believe I am defending access for CBP, but here we are.
  22. Yes, there are, as pointed out above. But the US already violates international law regarding asylees and refugees in a variety of ways. This is baked into the system no matter which party is in control of congress or the White House. Every presidential administration for decades has instituted or continued policies that violate international law. This incident described in this thread is obviously a more egregious example of what can happen when international asylum law is violated, but many, many asylum seekers have been harmed in different ways by US policies that violate international law.
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