Thinking about how Witchblade was a really horny ‘90s comic about a hot chick and her shapeshifting demonic symbiont, but the horny part was just that the symbiont would make itself look like a really slutty bikini
"That said, how impressive is it that I can keep doing that while under the effects of a brain infection?" They uh, make these things called "doctors" now. Maybe look into that shit?
Doctors HATE Him: Local Blogger Reinvents Eastern Spiritualist Traditions Of Health Through Contemplation Of His Mortal Vessel
what the mayor of new york is doing with psych hospitalization is not a new application of the way psych wards are used–psych survivors know this and we’ve been talking about it for decades the way that involuntary hospitalization is used as a form of social control, and the power and danger that a mental illness diagnosis holds. what is frightening about the way the mayor is talking about this is the way he is giving this quiet rhetoric legitimacy and a voice. psych professionals have been using involuntary hospitalization as a form of incarceration for a long fucking time, and as psych survivors know, you can get hospitalized involuntarily for Many things beyond just “being a danger to yourself or others.” what’s making me nervous right now is that this likely will lead to more interactions between police and homeless people where police feel emboldened to enforce even more options of incarceration. I think it is important to understand that New York is not the only place doing this and in fact this is the way involuntary hospitalization generally operates. New york is not an aberration: the whole system is intended to work like this and is completely fucked, which is why we need to be fighting for psych abolition and building in mad liberation to our understanding of prison abolition.
Hm, at least the classic men in white coats (the ones coming to take you away, ha-haaa) were like, asylum orderlies, not cops, with sedative syringes, not guns.
every time a fag is born she is cosmically linked to at least one dyke out there. when they find each other they will have the most beautiful friendship
This generation is too comfortable with casually dropping slurs
fathers casually dropping the craziest lore of their lives in the middle of a conversation
My brother and I trying to piece together our dad’s life based on random info he casually brings up once and then never mentions again
When my great grandpa was on his deathbed my grandpa (his son) was with him and says his last words were “I told them they shouldn’t have hanged that woman. Well by damn they’re paying now” and no one in my family knows what the fuck that means
My grandmother was harassing me about the dangers of online dating, and my grandpa was like, “Oh fer crying out loud, leave her alone. My parents met online, she’ll be fine.” Apparenly my great grandparents were both telegraph operators who would chat over the line in between messages and fell in love and my great grandma moved halfway across the country to marry a dude she met over the telegraph.
No one alive in the family had ever heard this story until like 70+ years later when I happened to start seeing a dude from OK Cupid.
No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.
Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.
Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.
It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.
In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.
“In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography” holy shit this is 100% right
This post was one of the ones that “made me” early on
Incredibly stupid to equate biotech with any of these other things but go off I guess.
the current thing is different, you see
Kontext, you’re an idiot. An entertaining one! But you are a clown and nothing you say is worth taking seriously.
“How on earth could the field working on developing a mechanistic understanding of biological systems be different in it’s contribution to how we manipulate those systems than fucking alchemy”
If humanity does make meaningful advances in extending the human lifespan beyond where it is currently, it will absolutely be attributable to advances in medicine, biotechnology, and molecular biology.
Establishing your prior from base rates is important, but you do then have to actually look beyond the base rates.
Like, I assure you, alchemy, 19th century electricity, post-war physics and computronics were all master life sciences of their day, understood as the keys to understanding life, and our world and lives today heavily rely on insights and innovations derived from all of them.
No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.
Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.
Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.
It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.
In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.
“In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography” holy shit this is 100% right
This post was one of the ones that “made me” early on
Incredibly stupid to equate biotech with any of these other things but go off I guess.
Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.
1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture
1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before
(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.
Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.
Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.
Blowback moment: Italian police busted a neo-Nazi terrorist cell planning attacks, and discovered that the members had been trained by, and gotten fighting experience from, the Azov Battalion.
Sorry, is this pro-invasion propaganda? I’m all for bashing fascists, but I need to be sure I understand the implication here. Can you explain?
Apologies if I’m misunderstanding.
The “implication” here is “those people are Nazis”. Because that’s what they are.
You guys are honestly so fucked if you’re unwilling to acknowledge the simply and widely documented (including by Western MSM pre-2022) reality that there’s far right nationalist/neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine with links to other far right groups throughout Europe and beyond who go there for training and war tourism for fear of appearing “pro-Russian.” Literally the most uncontroversial and simple opinion you should have on Ukraine is Nazis are bad and your government should stop giving them guns and money.
Oh yeah on here the old “zentropista” account of the Italian Casa Pound fascists would pump up Azov around the Crimea crisis; the “Ciao Dmitri” thing when someone died falling off an overpass during a banner drop and they kicked off a big campaign they’d clearly had as a contingency plan for building up a martyr – Dmitri had been a Ukrainian performing allyship at home
That said, it is not remotely uncontroversial and simple to refuse anti-Russian Nazis. That’s post-term antifascism. Remember “premature antifascists”, people rallying against the Nazis in the decades before they were built up as enemies of America in the runup to WWII? When they were just against Communist Russia, or at least Russia, or communists? And if you couldn’t bear that then uhhhhh… not to be trusted, there.
And flip side after the war Eastern European (and even marginally onsides First World like Italy) fascists were aligned with us, against the Russians. Remember like, the The Nazis Nazis? Those guys were against the Russians! And then we were. And are! And Azov’s not about to try to dismantle Western European capitalist empires sooooo…
hmm. what if I committed acts of terrorism until the world decided they should subsidize me hanging around university campuses and taking classes for for the rest of my life if I want to. what if I wrote a manifesto that was like “the problem of the modern age is that i have to get a real job eventually instead of just hanging around and studying whatever I want from whoever I want”. and I blew up bridges and industrial facilities about it and this convinced everyone that I was right.
I’m generally okay with the tumblr checkmarks for eight dollars because, like. websites need money to continue being websites. I like it here! I don’t want tumblr to cease to exist! Tumblr selling stupid little trinkets is preferable to tumblr becoming the bloated carcass that is every other website in order to stay afloat.
there’s a slider between user-funded and ad-funded and the further you are toward ad-funded the worse the website experience gets
Like I’ve mentioned precedents, the ‘68 NYC teacher’s strike and ethnic succession in the outer boroughs, but at least that had imaginable stakes, I’m not really clear why a Black/Jewish front of the culture war is opening up right now
I’m quite sure I haven’t written it anywhere so I can’t gloat about my predictions now, but I remember thinking back in June/July 2020 that white libs who try to maximize racial animosity are in for a rude awakening because of the amount of latent antisemitism in black communities that might get unlocked. The instigators were simply not mentally equipped to imagine that someone may answer “are Jews white” with “yes (derogatory)”.
But is it really a trend right now, or is it a series of incidents that can still be treated as isolated because they’re all actions of a single person (Ye)?
There’s been a couple of dudes like that in American pro sports in the last few years. DeSean Jackson in the NFL and (currently) Kyrie Irving in the NBA were the most prominent, and the general vibe from most other Black players was “Well, I don’t agree with all of that, but he’s got a point” or at the very least treating it as an unremarkable thing to say in Black culture, kind of like White people talking about their Racist Uncles. There were certainly almost no outright condemnations from other players.
Irving in particular is infamous for being (as far as anyone can tell) a literal flat earther, and being so antivax he left millions of dollars on the table and probably irreparably damaged his career by sitting out portions of the last few seasons. Just yesterday, he got suspended for five games for promoting the movie Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America (which is exactly the kind of movie you think it is) on his social media. This is embarrassing for obvious reasons for people who have invested emotional energy in the various dumb-evil-Whites-vs-everyone-else narratives.
This article about the whole thing fascinates me, though likely not the way the author intended. Irving is clearly deeply sincere about his ridiculous beliefs, yet the author, and the whole class of people the author represents, seems unable to conceive of him as anything other than a provocateur, an instigator, a bad-faith actor. It’s peppered with calls for Irving to apologize and stop spreading lies, but from Irving’s perspective, he’s the one speaking truth to power, and being asked to apologize for the ‘harm he’s caused’ is incoherent.
To me it represents how a certain worldview has crystalized in the minds of the media/professional/whatever class, that life is basically one big school/office, everyone already knows the right things to do and say, and if you refuse it must be because you’re deliberately trying to fuck things up, because you love chaos and hurting people. I say this not to defend Irving’s claims on the merits (he’s an idiot) but to point out how impoverished this is as a mental model, how little explanatory power it has. Like look at this quote:
There are plenty of people who want to see Kyrie reckon with what he’s done and understand its magnitude—who care enough to forgive, extend grace, learn, grow, and move on. This isn’t up to them, though.
This is not how you talk to or about a 30-year-old man. This is how you talk to an 8-year-old kid who stole from Dad’s wallet because he thought Dad wouldn’t notice.
So how do we ‘fix’ people like Irving, ‘undo the damage’ they’ve done? Well we can’t really. The thing about our knowledge-creation-and-dissemination mechanisms fracturing into a million pieces is that no one actually has the power to say “I am the Arbiter of Truth, do as I say” and actually be believed, not even well-meaning upper-class liberal businessmen and media people who think it’s their birthright. You can’t show them the light because there’s a million lights, all pointing in different directions.
The ironic thing is the big precedent of “how do we maintain a collective identity and system of Truth-seeking according to shared values when central institutions of authority collapse, yielding to many distributed local leaders?” is Jews
Like I’ve mentioned precedents, the ‘68 NYC teacher’s strike and ethnic succession in the outer boroughs, but at least that had imaginable stakes, I’m not really clear why a Black/Jewish front of the culture war is opening up right now
My line of thought now is that with COVID endemic in the terrestrial human ecosystem, which is the ecosystem any conceivable version of society will occupy, we are going to be getting it twice a year from now on, any cumulative organ damage or cancer risk will simply become part of the background noise of human lifespans ‘cause it’s not like we have an option other than having it in the mix along with the other coronaviruses we had been getting every few months our whole lives all along.
A hope is that like those others repeated infection builds lasting defenses, humans born after its introduction tank it in infancy and childhood like them and already-born humanity is better protected after each wave (and booster vaccine) – my own experience follows a path where the first, unvaccinated infection turned into a 24-month total brain and nerve collapse, the second brought 6 months of energy issues (both with “long tails” trailing off afterward), the third was just the initial respiratory week, and a possible 4th and 5th just brought a mild comeback of the 1st/2nd “long” symptoms but none of their own
In any case I expect any lingering roughness to polish out after we and the virus spend 500 years or so coevolving, I suppose within that span we might hit on some other angle to play with it.
