genuine question: is there any actual evidence that "joking about killing yourself worsens your mental health" or is it one of those perpetually uncited pop-psych things that people say because they are personally uncomfortable with hearing it

like when people say that about "calling yourself trash" or whatever I already think it's a tad overblown but I can at least see the train of logic involved. I am wholly unconvinced that you can meme yourself into committing suicide.

I think that it's more of an expression of an undercurrent of suicidal ideation, rather than causing that ideation . If you don't already have some kind of tendency towards suicidal thoughts or ideation, you aren't likely to immediately jump to it when something goes wrong. Jokes are like pearls; there's always that grain of truth buried somewhere inside.

Houston put someone on trial for feeding the homeless and jury calls bullshit

The state had to prove to a jury that feeding the homeless is a criminal act and in doing so, probably convinced a few members of the jury to sign up for food not bombs lol.

This is a great time to remind everyone on here about Jury Nullification

Def yell this out

I am about to head to Houston’s FNBH because goddamn.

People forget that jury nullification also allows people that break just and morally correct laws to go unpunished; jury nullification is why racists that attacked, beat, and sometimes murdered civil rights workers often went unpunished in the 60s. Jury nullification may be a legal right (kinda of, it's debatable), but it's not desirable. Jury nullification means that the system has failed, and that's not a good thing for anyone.

This does raise some interesting questions. Food in the 50s was "unhealthy" by modern standards, but people were--in general--less obese. Portion sizes were certainly smaller, but I'm not convinced that portion size alone is what made the difference. We know that our gut flora has some pretty significant impacts on our overall health, and we also know that gut flora is very different in obese people. I wonder if the highly processed foods that we tend to eat now have resulted in changes to our gut biome that's resulted in higher obesity? The relatively few people that have gotten to eat fries made with cow fat (beef tallow) and compared them to fries made with vegetable oils almost universally say that the beef tallow fries taste better.

...And was destroyed by an unknown bomber in 2022.

Hypothesis: some of the weirdness and badness of radical feminism and what I call Miss Manners feminism comes from these movements attracting a significant number of very sensitive people who happen to be female, think being a very sensitive person is a universal part of the experience of womanhood, and interpret the ways our society isn’t set up to accommodate very sensitive people as gender oppression. The experience of these people is kind of like this, but they have less self-awareness about how atypical they are and they interpret this experience entirely through the lens of gender oppression.

This is part of how they we get takes like “I’m a victim of my 14 year old son; his slamming the door when he’s angry is emotional abuse and gender terrorism” (not something I’ve ever seen directly, but example inspired by this, which is what set off this chain of thought today), and it’s the source of some these movements’ strong emphasis on female unsafety and promoting a “Miss Manners” sort of disciplining of public and private conduct. I suspect that when you see feminists of this type talking about how terrified they are of men in ways that sound paranoid and neurotic, what a lot of these women really mean is “I’m afraid men will yell at me or something and that frightens and stresses me to the point that I’m a miserable neurotic, but I know a lot of people won’t take a description of my real pain seriously so I’m going to talk as if I’m surrounded by psychos who might murder me for looking irritated when they clumsily compliment my new hair-cut.”

Restating the same hypothesis in a way that chops off some important complexity and nuance from it but maybe makes one of its essential points easier to understand: a non-trivial chunk of feminist discourse comes from rejection sensitive dysphoric women who think RSD is a female experience; what these women really want is social norms that are friendlier to RSD people, but because they think RSD is a female thing they see this as a facet of feminism.

Significant point: if this is correct, these women are in real pain, have real unmet needs, and deserve our sympathy; the problem is that they’ve misidentified the cause of their pain.

Interesting thesis. I wonder how many of the reactionary incels are rejection sensitive dysphoric men who think that their experiences are being caused by feminism? My guess is that it's close to 100%, and that they're the ones fueling the alt-right manosphere.

No you won’t ever be exactly the same again and that’s fine, actually.

I’m assuming you’re talking about the ‘died and came back different’ thing?

No, I’m talking about the mundane horror of existing as a human being.

Every day you are a different person. The weight of your experience changes you, and will continue to change you. I am not the same person I was 20 years ago. I will be an entirely different person 20 years from now.

October 3, 1992:  Sinead O’Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live singing an  acapella cover of Bob Marley’s song “War”, changing some of the lyrics to include references to child abuse, and ending the performance by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paull II and saying “fight the real enemy”.

This ruined her career and she was telling the truth, as we all came to find out years later.

Please remember she didn’t consider it as a career ruiner. 

To speak on how it “ruined” her career ignores her own feelings on it. Please acknowledge how she felt about it, instead of how you see it.

She was right, and she was talking about it before Catholic abuse made the mainstream. I vaguely remember when the SNL skit happened--I wasn't an SNL fan--and I remember the vicious fallout. John Geoghan--one of the most infamous child molesting priests--wasn't publicly outed until he was defrocked in '98, six years after O'Connor tore up the picture of Pope Wojtyła. Obvs. people knew about sex abuse, but it wasn't public. We should have listened to her.

Property taxes & schools

I was just kinda thinking something over, and since 99% of the accounts that follow me are 'bots, I'm not really expecting any feedback. But I'd love to hear some reasons why this would and wouldn't work. School districts are local. Okay, I get that, kinda of, in that it's hard to administer all schools in a state centrally. Let's go with that. But funding for schools is also mostly local--a percentage of funding does come from the state and federal gov't--and is paid for by property taxes. As near as I can see, property taxes are largely a flat assessed value, and based solely on local conditions. Those property taxes then go to local school districts. So if your district is wealthy, you're going to have better school facilities, be able to pay teachers more, etc. than a poorer municipal area. (As an aside, I grew up in a very wealthy town, and despite having only 400 students, total, in my high school, we had fantastic facilities and equipment, and some of the best teachers in the state.) It's pretty clear that poor urban areas have shittier schools--both facilities and teaching in general--than much wealthier school districts. So why do it that way? Why not make property taxes a state-level tax--no special millages, etc.--and make funding for all schools in the state per student funding, regardless of where the school is located? That removes the advantage that wealthy school districts, and hence students from wealthy families--have over poor school districts, so that they are competing more on merit rather than money. In addition, why not make the property taxes progressive, based off the entirety of your assessed property values, and apply the same formulas to businesses and commercial properties that are applied to residential? (You'd have to make some kinda of exception for agricultural or undeveloped land that would strongly discourage conversion or development.) Flat taxes are generally regressive and disproportionately affect poor people, so it would make sense to tax higher value properties at a higher rate. An absolutely critical part of all of this would be eliminating all local funding from schools; schools would need to use only state or federal monies. By "all local funding", I mean that schools would not be allowed to hold bake sales, etc. to raise more money. A serious downside I can see is that you'd need a way of tying all of this into CPI or inflation rates, so that revenue would track with increased costs. You'd also need to make sure that education revenue couldn't be touched by any other thing, and that taxes couldn't be cut at some point in the future; you'd probably have to write at least some of into a state constitution. BTW, I am a property owner, and yes, my taxes have gone up this year. Mostly because the house that I bought for under $100k is now "worth" a little over $300k, just five years later, which seems crazy, except that the housing market is nuts right now.

I have, unfortunately, found out why it's done this way. It's intentional. It ensures that certain school districts retain elite status, rather than being "dragged down" by others, because they have the funding to pay for the best facilities, teachers, etc.. That's why e.g. Chicago has the fucked-up school funding that they do; white, affluent families objected to their tax dollars funding poorer black school.

Conservatives like Jason Aldean have this mentality that city people are weak and wouldn’t last a minute in a rural or suburban area due to their threats of physical violence. But when they do that they’re actively admitting that they have no numbers and themselves couldn’t exert any kind of force or influence over you if surrounded by the public eye in an urban area.

Ultimately, these reactionaries are the ones that are weak. They’re afraid of cities precisely because they’re afraid of their lack of relative power when confronted with the masses. They only have strength when they can isolate you from watching eyes. They know that power disappears in a city. That’s what angers and terrifies them about cities so much. It’s not the “crime rates” or the homelessness, it’s that they can’t as easily exert their brand of white supremacy and patriarchy on a heavily populated diverse area.

They know the urban masses are an existential threat to the stability of the settler colonial capitalist-imperialist patriarchal world order and that’s why they’re afraid of labor struggles, LGBT struggles, women’s liberation and racial justice struggles in the cities. It’s a territory that concentrates us in huge numbers making us far more unruly and ungovernable than they’d like.

The urban proletariat must combine forces with the suburban and rural proletariat in order to build a united front against capital. Ultimately the suburban and rural petite and big bourgeoisie has the same interests as the urban petite and big bourgeoisie in suppressing any minimal reform for or revolutionary activity in the working and oppressed masses. The reactionaries believe the suburban and rural areas in the United States are their territory. But 2020 proved increasingly that these areas are actually deeply divided politically. Through gerrymandering and voter suppression it has been easy for the conservatives and reactionaries to hold power over these areas. But it is not guaranteed.

So “try that in a small town” Jason Aldean? The same small towns throughout the United States that did their own Black Lives Matter protests in 2020? I don’t think you realize the revolution is spreading wherever there are downtrodden workers and oppressed peoples. It’s already happening in your small towns. We are everywhere, by your necessity to constantly expand the labor pool and build all the necessary infrastructure for your empire, so be afraid not just of the cities where you know you’ll lose but also be afraid of your own backyard where your neighbors are getting awfully fed up of your minority rule. I’d be doubly afraid of those people, your neighbors, in rural and suburban areas. A lot easier to find someone’s remains in a city. But I’m a city girl and I wouldn’t know anything about that. 😘

It's not quite that simple. What Aldean is looking at is the dichotomy between gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (society). In a small town where you have community, everything is personal. People don't 'step out of line' because there's pressure from the social groups to conform to a certain standard. That standard can be positive, like being selfless/helping your neighbor/being kind, or it can be negative, like being a racist shitweasel in Harrison, AR. Whatever the social values are, in small towns everyone is always up in everyone else's shit all the time. In a large town or city, you have society; it's impersonal. Everyone is functionally anonymous, no one knows anyone, and so people can, and do, act badly. Accountability for acting badly is no longer personal--coming from people that you knows as individuals--but impersonal, coming from institutions (e.g., police). You can, and do, have communities within cities though; I lived in one in Chicago, where the old people on the block knew everything that was going on, and talked about and to everyone else on the block. I knew the people in the surrounding houses, and spoke to them regularly. But outside of that neighborhood, I was anonymous again. There's a lot of talk among leftists about building community; we should be trying to make our own small towns within cities, so that people have a place where they feel like they belong, and are individually, personally accountable. Not Aldean's vision of community, where people are punished for not conforming to gender norms, or wanting social justice.

Nemuki Junji Ito

The part where he wrote a comic about getting a cat--a very normal cat--with his girlfriend, and the whole thing was drawn as though it was going to be horror, and then wasn't, is fan-fucking-tastic.

What's funny is that the same people that are saying, "LOL OMG THIS IS SO TRUE!" are almost always the same people claiming that the NRA doesn't allow guns in their meetings. Which, BTW, is 99% false; the only meeting they haven't allowed guns at was one where Trump was present, and guns were only prohibited in the hall that he was speaking at (per Secret Service requirements). Yes, you can carry guns at NRA conventions, as long as a former shitbag-turned-shitbagpresident isn't speaking, and you can absolutely carry guns at SHOT Show.

this huey newton read of marx gets me every time; he really said a racist clock is right twice a day

I wouldn't say that it's more like a clock where the second hand has fallen off while everything else is working just fine. Marx can be right about the general way of thinking and in how he's defining the problem, while still being wrong about certain particulars (e.g., race). I'm not convinced that Marx is right about everything, specifically the part where he believes that a communist dictatorship will eventually evolve to a stateless communist society. I take a dim view of humanity, and I'm unconvinced that people are capable of living in a stateless society of more than perhaps 100 people at a time.

Fiction often imitates real life situations. In fact, fiction is a great way to explore and raise awareness about real things.

It's not inherently disrespectful to show real things in fiction, or comparing between fiction and real life. It's all about how you go about it.

Not a cult survivor myself but have spent a lot of time studying them and like statistically if you understand how a cult operates and indoctrinates people you put yourself and your loved ones at a lower risk of being taken in as you will begin to recognise the patterns of indoctrination. There's way more harm in the fear mongering and sensationalising of cults in news media than there is in critically analysing depictions of cults or cult-like communities in fiction. Fiction can be an educational tool and if more people learn how to spot indoctrination methods because they saw someone draw comparisons to a movie they liked, that's a net good.

Please help me find that post because I'd love to reblog it.

Found it

exactly; thank you, abraham

[Image ID: Orange text on a black backround reading: "#Several of my stories are about cults #And hey guess what? #My mother is a fucking cult leader #Get it together people" /END ID]

You're welcome ♡♡♡

As a cult survivor, it’s very important to make stories about cults! Just be respectful and do your research. It helps literally no one of every fictional cult is shadowy devil worshippers trying to end the world, because cults just… don’t really look like that in real life. They look perfectly respectable, normal, and they’re easy to fall into. Yes, even you could join one. Nobody is “too smart,” and in fact cults specifically prey on that misconception.

And IF you realize what’s happened, it’s usually long after you’re already entrenched in the culture that contains all your friends, community, support network, and reason to live allll rolled up into one.

If you wanna do research at a reputable place, your first stop is the BITE method! It’ll tell you exactly what makes a cult a cult and how mind control is used to keep people inside. Good luck on your story.

I will second Steven Hassan's BITE model (https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/). It's not perfect, since there's not a scale for how much coercive control a group exerts over members, but it's a great starting point. Ultimately, there's not any absolute determinant whether or not a particular group is, or is not, coercively controlling members. It's pretty clear to most people that Scientology is a coercive, high-demand religion (e.g., "cult"). Jehovah's Witnesses often look like a coercive high-demand religion. Mormons are a softer, kinder version of the same shit that JWs have to deal with.

A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore

The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.

Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”

As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species

I guess I have two responses to this: an idealistic response and a cynical response.

My idealistic response is “Preserving natural ecology is not my goal. My goal is the flourishing, happiness, and security for all sentient life. In practice we should recognize that in current circumstances, casual, unplanned, uncontrolled disruption of of natural ecological systems is quite frequently detrimental to the flourishing, happiness, and security of sentient life. Maybe we would rather convert the non-sun matter of the solar system into a matryoshka brain and upload all minds to live happy immortal lives, but we definitely can’t do that now, and we probably can’t do that ever. 

Preserving natural ecology, then, is itself a necessary compromise. We may also need to make a further compromise: not just preserving natural ecosystems, but directly harming sentient beings to do so, in the hopes that harm toward sentient beings helps maintain the balance of the ecosystem, and while a balanced ecosystem itself is no great shakes for a lot of the beings living in it, it’s better than lettings things get disrupted in an unplanned, unpredictable manner.

All of these compromises may be necessary, but we should never lose sight of our ultimate values. Preservation of the natural order is not my core value. If the natural order is that we get a virus that disrupts our ability to breath and kills a bunch of us, we find a way to make vaccines that protect us more than our natural naïve immune response can. If the natural order is that someone gets large breasts, a vagina, broad hips, sparse facial hair, but he is profoundly unhappy about that, we find ways to give him a biology closer to what makes him happy. We don’t have perfect stuff – our vaccines don’t completely prevent infection, our HRT and SRS doesn’t generally give people quite the bodies they’d want ideally, we’re much further than that from being able to create a world where rabbits need not fear a human hunter with a shotgun, a fox with sharp teeth, or starvation on a depleted, barren wasteland, and where foxes simultaneously needn’t fear starvation themselves – but we’ve still got to do the best we can.” 

My cynical response is “I wonder how many of the people agreeing with this are really incorporating principles of ecological conservation into their lives better than vegans they’re pwning. Like, do they eat a diet of culled invasive and overpopulated plant and animal species like Asian carp, garlic-mustard, nightcrawlers, and Canada geese, perhaps supplemented as necessary with minimally impactful agricultural products like pulses and grains? Or do they just go to a restaurant and say ‘Hmm… the Sichuan eggplant and tofu sounds good to me right now, but so does the chicken lo mein. Wait, I had the eggplant last time. I’ll have the chicken lo mein this time,’ in spite of having every reason to believe that the chicken comes from factory farming operations which combine animal cruelty with ecological devastation.”

I gave up buying and eating pork about five years ago, and since then the only times I've had it have been accidental. My intent is, and has been, to take up hunting feral pigs as a replacement. There's no need for me to hunt deer, because there are sufficient deer being culled already. But feral pigs are a blight on the southern states of the US. Canadian geese are not an invasive species in my area. I don't actually like fish all that much, but I've heard that lionfish--an invasive species around Florida--is quite tasty.

"ANAL / All Nazis Are Losers"

Sticker seen in Vienna, Austria

"To make matters worse, the Teamsters’ motivations to strike are being emboldened by misinformation and mischaracterizations, especially the idea that UPS’s treatment of part-time employees is somehow reason enough to strike."

I want this man to be thrown into a labor camp when the revolution comes.

I just looked this guy up. The newspaper is very much hiding what he actually did at the company.

As usual, the media will walk hand-in-hand with the forces of capitalism to make sure the worker stays down.

[IDs: Page 1 of Deryl Hill's LinkedIn work experience.

UPS - 38 yrs 6 mos:

/end IDs]

I've personally spoken to my regular UPS driver and asked him why the Teamsters might choose to go on strike. I have let him know that I fully support them, regardless of any personal inconvenience.

Charles Barkley-I will reblog this every time I see it.

I'm not rich, and I'm certain that being 'cancelled' for being anti-fascist would put a significant crimp in my ability to pay my bills. But yeah, I do my best to stand up for LGBTQ+ and other marginalized peoples when they are being marginalized for inherent qualities.

THE AUDACITY OF THEM TO SAY THIS, FUCK NETFLIX FR

Man who won't release viewing figures says show was unpopular.

Easy to prove, innit? Black Spot was cancelled (or a season 3 hasn't been announced) and the budget for that show would have been pretty small. Archive 81 was cancelled after a single season, and that debuted at #7 for streaming, and reached the #2 spot briefly (https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/netflix-ratings-archive-81-cheer-top-10-1235156552/), with 128M hours of viewing over the eight episodes that were released. So let's see the proof.