I’m just a bleeding heart lefty I guess. Thankfully I’m Canadian.

Exactly. It’s absolutely horrible the government doesn’t.

Ooh that’s awful.

I really do. It’s terrible. I acknowledge that there is a public nuisance and safety aspect that they bring to the community because of addiction and why people on the other side get frustrated by it, but nobody goes out in life and thinks “I’ll be a homeless drug addict, that’s the way to live”. It’s a product of multiple factors, poverty, etc. And it’s absolutely terrible to try and get clean off substances, especially when you have no home to go to when you’re done.

This is what happens when you have conservative governments. They’re absolutely fine letting these poor people rot.

That’s fucking awful.

I really wish we had very harsh punishment for drug dealers here.

I’m continually afraid they’re going to topple over.

I was downtown today and saw at least 6 people doing it. It’s just infected everything in the city, not just the people who are addicted and suffering, but the public nuisance and safety aspect because of them too. The library today felt so sketchy.

My neighbour who works downtown told me she flat out hates them, she goes outside to smoke and they’re screaming at her to give them one and threatening her when she says no. It’s terrible on both sides.

That’s awful. Holy shit.

It’s apparently a neuromuscular reaction to the drug in the spine. Called the fentanyl fold, someone told me in another comment. I wonder what the long term damage neurologically is.

Aww. It’s so terrible to see them this way, especially because it’s been an exceptionally cold December.

Ohhhhh! I didn’t know that was a thing! Thank you. Fentanyl is a real problem here so of course that would be it.

These poor people. It’s absolutely dreadful what’s happening.

December has been cold and snowy here this year. It’s kind of nice.

Don’t blame it on Yokie!

I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it’s scary what happens.

There was a good interview in Rolling Stone with Carl Newman of the band The New Pornographers. Last year the band’s drummer was arrested and later convicted of sexually pestering children and CSAM possession. (Yes the name is an unfortunate coincidence but was their name for many years before this drummer was a member, and it refers to something else).

Carl talked about how devastated the band is by all of this, and a family member who works in the court system gave him some advice, talking about how pedophiles are always looking for an opportunity, and how you really should not have anything about your children online because they WILL use it no matter how innocent, and how you should watch your kids incredibly carefully online, that it’s not just kids from vulnerable families getting trafficked.

I see that it feels intrusive, but I myself read a lot of judicial decisions online, and the pedophile ones are always HORRIFIC. Just because there isn’t a physical victim doesn’t make it better. One case the police were notified by an ISP about a guy and they went to his house and found a child sized sex doll in his home. One thing leads to another. A lot of the testimony by men who have not committed physical crimes talk about how they were depressed and just began going into more extremes of porn, and just ended up beginning to watch CSAM as an extension of this. They would get phallometric testing which would show they are sexually oriented to children so this isn’t always true, but the easy access to literally anything via the Internet sure isn’t helping anything.

I miss Livejournal, the original Livejournal where you were able to tell people intimate things about yourselves and make friends for life.

Registered midwives here have university degrees and a professional college to answer to. The US seems to have “lay midwives” which is pretty much nothing more than a doula, and certified nurse midwives. The level of education is very different.

There have been midwives in Australia prosecuted for not transferring to hospital, and this lunatic woman in Canada who was dismissed from practice but still attends births, and recently a baby she attended died. I kind of get it in the US simply because of lack of public health care probably driving this due to cost, but in countries with public health care and so many midwife options it’s insane. I’m glad finally someone is shining a light on this, perhaps it’ll save some babies. A nurse on the medicine subreddit once said she had seen complications and deaths from home birth and freebirth that are in the triple digits.

Even when they do successfully get baby out, there’s SO much they don’t know, and when they take them to ER because baby is breathing funny (because their lungs are wet) or came out stunned or they didn’t wrap them up warmly and now they’re cold, or they turn blue because mom has untreated gestational diabetes and their sugar has crashed or whatever. It can be temporary but it’s just so not necessary.

Common, but if your placenta stops working baby is gone.

I think part of the culprit for this trend is the fact that Americans have to pay for maternity care, which is stupid (paying privately for any health care is also stupid). This makes them shop around and get sucked into this.