My favorite gag is mixing up the distinction between oft confused terms. Like, oh no, it's quite simple: stalactites have hit the earth's surface but stalagmites are found in space. Meteorites can be distinguished by their round snouts and asteroids by their sharper snouts. Oh, and remember: crocodiles hang from the ceiling. It's alligators that point up from the ground.
okay see this xkcd addition kind of annoys me because I'm 100% sure there's an xkcd which is 1:1 with this post joke
[ID:
xkcd comic:
"Check it out - I got a piece of a meteor" "Actually, it’s only called that while falling. Once it lands, it’s called magma. captioned: My hobby: Mixing pedantic terms
End ID]
Hii! Appearing again to say I love your blog, and maybe also asking for some recommendations for books about Indian art or just cultural history, history that is more about the common life😊🥰
hi! thank you! here are a few books i like —
Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Muzaffar Alam: about the culture of travel between the Mughal and Persian empire; really interesting take on how geographical discovery worked and was thought of
Wanderers, Kings and Merchants by Peggy Mohan: a linguistic history of the subcontinent told through stories of how languages travelled and how linguistic cultures developed
False Allies by Manu Pillai: about princely states in British India and their cultural and political relationship with nationalism and the mainstream national movement
Everyday Lives, Everyday History by Uma Chakravarty: I think this is about ancient India; but anyhoo: it looks at how the histories of common people are and can be told and how we do that in practice with ancient India
Cricket Country by Prashant Kidambi: how the sport took root in India and interacted with existing faultlines, told through the story of how the first cricket team was put together
House But No Garden by Nikhil Rao: about the development of suburbs in Bombay in the early 21st century, how colonial town planning interacted with native communities and the cultures that developed therein
also, some more on indian art
I hope you find something you like!
Long time listener first time caller (well not really I'm pretty sure we've talked about Succession before). I wanna read up more on anti psychiatry but I'm fucking shithouse at reading, are there any like videos or podcasts or audiobooks you'd recommend, because that would make my life ten times easier
yes great question honestly. i haven't heard all of these podcast episodes, but i curated the list based on knowing the speakers' work (not necessarily the podcast hosts/shows!), and i think these are good places to start.
- "Debunking the Myth of the Chemical Imbalance with Dr. Joanna Moncrieff" interviewed by Dr. Caroline Leaf
- Revolution Health Radio: "Reviewing the Evidence on the Serotonin Theory of Depression, with Dr. Joanna Moncrieff"
- Mad in America Radio: Lucy Johnstone on the Power Threat Meaning Framework
- NPR Fresh Air: Anne Harrington on psychiatry's "troubled search" for a biological understanding of mental illness
- New Books Network: Mical Raz on her book "What's Wrong With the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty"
- The Mental Breakdown Morning Show: "Bruce Cohen and Psychiatric Hegemony" (Cohen, unlike most on this list, explicitly aims for a marxist explanation and understanding of mental illness)
- Madness Radio: "Bipolar Medication Myths" (Joanna Moncrieff interviewed by Will Hall)
- What Your GP Doesn't Tell You: "David Healy Discusses SSRI Drugs, Suicide and Sexual Dysfunction"
- Coming From Left Field: "The Political Economy of Mental Health Systems with Joanna Moncrieff"
- States of Mind: "Mental Illness in America" (includes segments with Katherine Bankole-Medina, Jonathan Metzl, Allan Horwitz, Jamie Cohen-Cole, and Elyn Saks)
- Jesse Meadows's podcast on ADHD, "Sluggish" (haven't listened to this one, but have read a lot of their writing; they're challenging the psychiatric view of ADHD as a person who struggles with the symptoms and behaviours the diagnostic label describes)
audio books: i'm honestly not sure where's the best and cheapest place to actually download these from, but i know there are audio books of 'mind fixers' by anne harrington (narrated by joyce bean) and 'desperate remedies' by andrew scull (narrated by jonathan keeble). uh, if anyone has a good list of audiobooks on this lmk :-)
manager i cant come to work today i forgot how to mimic the behavior of a human. being
cultural-antifascism-deactivate
idk guys maybe we should try calling the amazon rain forest “sovereign indigenous lands” more often because i’m still seeing people talk about it like some sort of vast terra nullis where there are only animals–you know, like a colonialist
bannions
There are lots of indigenous people and tribes here, and their culture is shared a lot in my hometown — I’m from Manaus which is a city literally in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. So, yeah, people need to stop talking like that.
Tell us about the wellness to fash pipeline tho
"Wellness" is not just alternative medicine, it is essentially a theory of the body which posits if something makes you feel better, you are better in some meaningful way. I would argue it one of the most commonly held nonreligious magical beliefs in the modern world.
Wellness as a concept has its genesis in the 1950s with "workplace wellness" programs, a sort of budget alternative to offering employee healthcare benefits. This was an era soaked in itinerant business preachers offering classes on things like "hypnosis at a management level" and "yoga to improve leadership abilities". I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much.
The capitalist medical system regularly abandons people. We've all heard stories of profit driven pharmaceudical companies holding the ill hostage for extreme markup on life-saving medicines. People have real, legitimate, reasons to mistrust medical professionals.
Let's say you have chronic pain, and everything your doctor offers you is either ineffective, expensive, or addictive. You are desperate for literally any release, so you start looking into other solutions. You will find an OCEAN of snake-oil salesmen willing to sell you "the secrets doctors don't want you to know."
What is frustrating, is that pain is actually partially psychological. Some wellness techniques may have an actual, medical, benefit on some patients. The worst thing a conspiracy theorist can have is a point. So now you actually do kinda feel better, and you have a sense of loyalty to the grifter selling you 300$ Sumerian Cock Oil Pills. These people are the core of the wellness industry. They are the examples that everyone else points to and says "Well it worked for them!"
Reactionary thought blooms in environments like this. If the medical industry can't be trusted, what else can't be trusted? At any given time, you are two clicks away from "vaccines cause autism." Three clicks away from "Cavemen were 15 feet tall because they only ate meat." And four clicks away from "The medical industry is controlled by The Jews to drain our wallets and keep us sick." Echoes of Nazi attitudes towards German-Jewish doctors are a common backbeat.
Wellness itself is relatively harmless, (compared to the things it is adjacent to) but it acts as a sort of idealogical airport that exposes the curious to a deluge of potentially radicalizing communities. The longer you spend in communities like this, the higher the chance you'll come across something that meshes perfectly with your own biases.
No one is doomed to abuse people. There isn't an "abuser gene" or "evil chromosome". There aren't "cursed bloodlines".
There's a culture that frequently enables, romanticizes and eroticizes abuse, and individual human beings who choose to take advantage of that, or not.
Even someone who has abused others in the past has a decision about whether or not to continue that harm. Further abuse isn't inevitable, it's a choice.
The idea that abusers can't help it just further enables abuse culture. If someone is abusive, they are making a choice.
The “bats can do calculus” thing is funny, because if you play around with synths for a while, you realize a lot of what humans perceive as “natural” sounds are just us directly perceiving certain complex mathematical things as big gestalt gestures. Like recognizing a multiplied wave as sounding like a woodwind. Hearing individual notes within a chord is basically Fourier analysis. Feeling how naturally a note decays is perceiving how linear or exponential the curve is. The fact that a sine wave sounds smooth but a sawtooth wave sounds nasally, and a square wave has a certain hollow fuzz to it. Is someone doing “math” there? Once you get the flavor of what each of those qualities are like, listening to the world becomes like directly perceiving math. Also, listening to birds becomes very strange. Because you realize some goofy easy weird sound you can squelch out of an analog synth is the same thing a bird is doing. Then sometimes they make a sound you can’t make. What kind of math is that bird on? Makes you wonder.
showing my dog the saw movies while my parents are on vacation
uh oh guys
my parents are fine with it
i cannottttt in my lifetime read another legacy headline that just goes like This Chemical Is Everywhere Now And It's In Your Bones And Brain: Is It Harmful???? literally........... what am i supposed to do with that. how about YOU find out and then report back !
I reckon it's very telling how easily the Cop show replaced the Western as like the default US action genre. Both expressions of the same fundamental worldview just in different settings with different signifiers
I think a lot of stuff about DnD (especially the earlier editions themselves but also just the general assumptions that filtered down to today) makes sense if you realise how much influence the Western had on it. Like once again it expresses the same sort of ideology just with different signifiers; swords instead of sixshooters, knights instead of cowboys, orcs instead of "injuns"
Our Hero (cop/cowboy/adventurer) is marauding into a hostile, unconquered place (urban centre/indigenous land/fantasy wilderness) that, while notionally uninhabited, is occupied by an inherently-dangerous other (criminals/indigenous people/orcs) who are morally permissible to kill by the dozens - the power imbalance, which makes killing dozens of these opponents, without seriously fearing for one's own life in each encounter, possible, is a natural, positive thing. The pure innocents being protected (white suburbia/white settlement/white townsfolk) are defenseless, sheep against wolves, needing above-human individuals as their sheepdogs. The Heroes take wealth and power in exchange for very little risk, and the ability to kill with impunity - but, we can be assured, they do it out of moral selflessness, defense of the helpless against an assuredly-real threat. They're brave. They venture into the (drug-user's house/indigenous family's campsite/dungeon).
We have some other rules in our libraries that we tell all our educators to follow. For instance, no educator is allowed to use physical punishment or yell. If a child damages a book, we aren’t allowed to react angrily. We only explain. We do not tell the children how to sit or stand or poke at them generally.
If a child runs away with a book, we do not chase and force her to give it back. We have to trust that she will return it.
Most girls and older children get books issued and take them home. Sometimes, the books get damaged as well.
All the children and adults come together once a month to repair the books in the library. Taping torn pages or sticking them together with glue teaches children to handle the books gently in the future. It also reduces conflict.