i am destructive and you are / spun sugar

-monet in bloom, 2022

Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Pittsburgh, PA

Small reminder for my Texas/southwest peope. Going to be expecially nasty next week. Stay hydrated, stay cool, keep an eye on your neighbors.

Popping this back up, since it’s getting hot here, and won’t get any cooler ‘til October.  Stay hydrated, friends!

the future is now

are people that lazy to need this

While I’m sure there are people too lazy to spin a fork, keep in mind people like this person who may be suffering from arthritis or a neurological disease or nerve damage or a thousand other conditions that might impair their ability to do things as simple as spin a fork to eat spaghetti. 

These are used with people who can’t grip well: 

This is for Parkinsons’s: 

For people who can’t even bend their joints: 

Here’s a product that guides your hand from your plate to your mouth 

This one holds a sandwich 

Like I get it. I used to see things like the fork and think “that’s fuckin’ lazy” or that product that holds a gallon and you just tip it and pour. But then I started working around the disabled and impaired and found out that these products aren’t meant for lazy people, they’re meant for people who need help. 

So maybe next time you see something, instead of thinking “Wow, are people that lazy?” just be grateful that you’re able to do the things you do every day and take for granted, like being able to feed yourself and wipe your own ass because you have enough coordination and bendy joints to do it. 

This isn’t specualtion either; the majority of products from commericals that we think are funny or silly are autally MEANT for hte disabled.But they are marketed towards the abled because the disabled aren’t considered a viable enough demographic on their own. the Snuggie for example? Created for wheelchair users.

This is actually really nifty.

oh my god of course the snuggie was for wheelchair users

The fact that anyone buys these products besides disabled people drastically lowers the price of them. These would normally cost hundreds if not thousands if dollars. Because if spent time and money creating it, the company wants to get more than that back. And they can’t do that if they sell and market these primarily to disabled people for $20-$40 a piece or whatever. They’d lose money on production. If they can sell hundreds of them to everyone, they can lower the price drastically and therefore disabled people don’t die while trying to scrape up the money to buy these things and be a bit more independent.

I never considered that last part and that’s actually genius

Like yeah, a handful of people ARE that lazy.

But those are the people who use these products even though they don’t need them and thus allow the price to be lower for those who DO.

So honestly in this case good bless the lazy and those prone to gimmicks because they are invaluable to the elderly and disabled in this sense.

@thebibliosphere Look! People learning about disability and why to be kind!

The normalization of disability aids needs to be a thing precisely so they can cost less.

To expand on the crumbling of the patriarchal edifice of the family.

If society agrees that children can know themselves, and have a right to self determination…. Everything else that Conservatives argue they have a right to exert over children crumbles. As just two examples….

ALL corporal punishment rightfully becomes recognised for the assault it is.

Failure to appropriately consider the wishes of children in medical care and provide information in an age appropriate way is recognised as child abuse and malpractice.

Children are entire people, they deserve all of the rights, privileges and protections afforded to adults.

Found this on the interwebs… Offered here for… REASONS.

5,500 km route of a loggerhead sea turtle tracked by Turkish scientists.

Zoomable map >>

Malta make u lose control

where was he going

This is THE strangest picture i have ever seen…. like what?

i feel very uncomfortable right now

mind fuck.

shout out to the abyss and also delusions

Hmm. American Football should probably never be played

Once a month or so I hear about some veteran of the league doing something insane and everyone kinda looks at each other like "this probably downstream of the fact that he has severe brain damage from playing football for over a decade"

Uhhh. The pervasiveness of sexual/domestic violence in professional sports is a massive issue in which these players are absolutely not, in any regard, the victims.

You can literally google any sport followed with “assault” & find several horrific instances of violence (against women) but like sure lol. It must be cause those pro golfers suffered so many head injuries :/

Can't believe I forgot that the world is evenly divided into abusers and victims, and that if someone fits in one category in one aspect of their life they can never fit into the other elsewhere

Indeed, if medical studies show that repeated head trauma causes symptoms including dramatic mood swings, aggression, and impulsiveness, the people surveyed in those studies must've just been terrible people from birth :/

Oh cool so i guess I missed which one of those symptoms included “multiple sexual assaults spanning multiple years” lmfao ~indeed~ this literally isn’t about CTE but I think it’s cute how you glossed over that whole entire point.

This is what the brain looks like on zero materialism, very sad

yeah the idea that brain damage can cause personality changes, especially included increased aggression, violence, and lack of empathy is extremely well established. The most obvious being Phineas Gage's personality change, but there's a wide body of evidence on this. Increased aggression and sexual disinhibition (including "behaving sexually at inappropriate times", much like Antonio Brown's pool incident) are textbook examples of the kind behavior changes that can occur after brain injury. There's much more cut and dry cases as well; while rare, some brain injuries can cause out-of-character hypersexual behavior and sexual aggression. In one case a man even developed pedophilic behavior (which he had never shown any signs of before), which turned out to be the result of an egg-sized tumor in his frontal lobe. This behavior disappeared as soon as the tumor was removed. A year later the behavior began to return, and sure enough, a brain scan showed the tumor was back. After a second surgery, the behavior disappeared again. The article in which this behavior is described makes the connection between brain damage and this kind of behavior extremely clear

(citations in the source changed to hyperlinks for ease of follow-up)

The bottom line is that "wanting to rape people" and "knowing that rape is morally wrong" are both specific behaviors that are stored in the brain. If you lesion the part of the brain that inhibits sexual aggressiveness, the subject will be more sexually aggressive. If you damage or destroy the part of the brain that stores the knowledge that rape is wrong, then the subject will no longer know that rape is wrong. Nobody here is trying to treat Brown as some kind of poor smol victim who couldnt help but assault people. But to start from a moral premise that "sexual assault is a purely individual choice with no outside factors" and then to reason backwards from there about what facts must be true to support that claim is extremely backwards. The point of this post is absolutely not to make excuses for abusers and rapists. The point is to show that there are certain factors that can statistically increase likelihood of committing sexual assault, and that as a form of harm reduction we should attempt to prevent those factors to minimize downstream risk of assault. In this case, if there are certain sports that cause frequent brain damage, then it might be a good idea, both for players and for the potential people they might hurt, to change those sports so that they have less risk of causing that kind of brain damage.

#man that person replying is absolutely wild

#like the op wasn't even talking about rape and merely saying that something that regularly causes brain damage is bad actually

#and it's like the merest possibility of preventing harm (verifiable harm that in no way results from the person's possible crimes!)#just short circuited them

#these weird puritanical types desperately want to believe that agency exists in some ephemeral state outside the brain#and the body#and thus everything is reducible to the absolute moral quality of the soul and the possibility that this could be physically impaired#or simply change over time#is some weird philosophical threat

#idk i do see this line of thinking a lot even if most people aren't so absurdly irrational and hair-trigger about it

--tags via anghraine

It’s fucking wild that people still do not fundamentally understand what a brain is and how it works. That you can change the person by changing the brain. That you can, indeed, lose your inhibitions after taking repeated injury to the part of the brain that allows you to inhibit yourself. Our entire self is the result of electrical currents coursing through chemical-laced squishy matter and it’s pretty crucial that we understand that. Especially since our justice system is way too focused on fault and blame and punishment, and not minimizing harm whatever that takes. Assault of any kind is a crime either way, and there’s a victim either way, and no one is arguing against that. But if you want to reduce it, you have to look at the causes, and sometimes those causes are not just gonna be ‘is a shitty person’ and you have to accept that so you can address it.

So yeah let’s stop bashing brains to the degree that it changes personalities and see how that affects the statistics, for a start.

i dont know exactly how to articulate this in a way other people havent but everything is too fast now. 24/7 news cycle, online focuses that last for hours instead of months or years, songs written just so ten seconds can go viral. movies and books churned out to meet some nebulous income quota. idk. im motion sick

i thought your boyfriend was cute so i encased him in amber

hey guys idk if you know this but if you don't sleep or eat your mental health gets worse