#but like posts like that are just dangerously misinformative about such a complex issue

[sophieinwonderland]

This might be upsetting but I just saw a post from did a dose of reality and it was concerning to say the least. They said the disorder wasn’t real but they play along with their clients pretending to validate their alters, only because they think that will intergrate them.

And that the only patients that leave them are the “fakers.”

Yikes!

Actually, what is even going on with that blog? There is so much blatant misinformation there.

1. Partial DID

ICD-11:

Do I need to say more?

2. Hallucinations in Dissociative Identity Disorder

They also suggest a few time that DID doesn't involve hallucinations...

Now... I doubt that "those in therapy" are aware of the DSM-5-TR, which is what I think this person is referring to since they talk about it elsewhere. Like, most therapists probably won't give their patients a rundown of the new medical manuals, right? But even if they did, I feel this person missed something pretty important in the TR.

But the TR actually undersells this association. According to one study, these hallucinations are MORE COMMON THAN IN SCHIZOPHRENIA.

And not by a small margin either.

Physical sensations associated with voices were reported 97% of the time in DID compared to 50% in Schizophrenia groups. Visual hallucinations were nearly twice as common. Tactile hallucinations, about 3 times as common.

This misinformation is genuinely dangerous.

If this alleged therapist decided that hallucinations are all psychotic, then their perception of DID could very easily be influenced by the fact that they've misdiagnosed many of their dissociative patients with psychotic disorders.

3. People with DID want their alters gone

I'm going to note that the title is my interpretation. They don't clearly say this. They just say that people with DID want to finish the job and cure it. But the way they talk about alters strongly leaves this impression.

I absolutely think it's true that most people with DID don't want to have a disorder.

But many would like to pursue healthy multiplicity.

And I'd like to point again at the table in the above study. When participants were asked if they would miss their voices if they stopped, a massive 69% answered that they would. That's a huge majority of DID systems in that study.

4. Complex DID

There is actually a certain level of truth to this one too. Complex-DID is not an official diagnosis, and HC-DID is a community term that can be a bit misleading because it sounds like a clinical term. (Similar issue with emotional amnesia.)

Having said that... this is a really silly way to go about this...

"Complex" as an adjective means that something is complicated. It's not the same as the noun "complex." Having a "complex disorder" would never be related to "having a complex."

Might as well try to convince your student that they're claiming to be an apartment complex.

I would suggest both they and their student take an English class.

Anyway, while HC-DID isn't a medical term and C-DID isn't an official diagnosis, I suspect "complex DID" likely comes from this paper.

5.) The Flight or Flight Reaction

Remember, if you make someone with a dissociative disorder angry, they'll always run away because they're literally incapable of fighting back. If they do argue with you fakeclaiming them, then that PROVES they were faking all along.

Never mind that not every instance of people being upset with you on the internet and calling you our for harmful behavior is because they're triggered. (In the traumatic sense.)

Never mind that "Fight" is a natural reaction to trauma when it is triggered.

Never mind that people who might normally run away were it something triggering you said to just them may engage because they don't want your words harming other people. /s

Anyway, yeah... this is a really gross blog from a very ableist and uninformed therapist, filled to the brim with misinformation, and I would highly advise people ignore it.

#syscourse #system discourse #pro endo #pro endogenic #sysblr #multiplicity #psychiatry #psychology #therapy #mental health #ableism #sanism #psych critical #systems #system #tw fakeclaiming

[whentherewerebicycles]

ugh I am really struggling with a thing with a former student/mentee of mine. in the week or two of the post-hamas attack aftermath I posted something on instagram that was basically like, i feel an obligation to be an informed global citizen and believe me I read/think about/despair over the news every day but I also think it’s ok to really viscerally hate “doing politics” on social media, where complex, centuries-old geopolitical and cultural conflicts get reduced to a sensationalized infographic some teenager designed on canva last night. at the time I was watching people spread rampant misinformation about the hospital explosion when we had zero conclusive information, and had also just heard jon favreau talking about research indicating that something like 80% of the images and videos people were sharing on social media weren’t actually FROM the current conflict or couldn’t be verified as real. and idk I also have some private thoughts about how american leftists in particular really glom onto this issue because we perceive israelis as ‘white people’ and palestinians as people of color and we get to feel like we are exorcising our own country’s racial demons by advocating for the expulsion of the israeli people from land that many of them actually have deep historical ties to and at least a semi-legitimate cultural and religious claim to inhabiting.

to be clear I think the current israeli government is pretty much your trump-inspired shitty/evil right-wing militaristic populist movement and I feel like their response has squandered every single ounce of empathy garnered by the hamas attacks!! but idk I guess what I want to carve out space for is like, the right to say I AM NOT AN EXPERT HERE. I DO NOT HAVE DEEP ENOUGH KNOWLEDGE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THE ROOTS OF THIS CONFLICT. I WORRY ABOUT SPREADING DANGEROUS MISINFORMATION IN BOTH DIRECTIONS IF I SHARE UNVERIFIED SOURCES OR REDUCTIVE TAKES. ALSO I AM A PRIVATE CITIZEN AND I DO NOT HAVE A “PLATFORM” JUST BECAUSE I HAVE A SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT. I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BE CONFUSED, TO NOT PASS SNAP JUDGMENTS ON RAPIDLY EVOLVING INTERNATIONAL INCIDENTS, AND TO ENGAGE IN POLITICS BY MEANS OTHER THAN SOCIAL MEDIA POSTING. but idk this former student, who I had a really good relationship with for many years, has just come after me in my DMs and keeps sending me posts implying that anyone who is not furiously posting right now is pro-Palestinian genocide, etc etc, and meanwhile she is posting hundreds of unverified stories a day from Arabic-language sources that aren’t just like, anti-Zionist but are actively pro-Hamas, actively denying that the attacks on Israel happened, and actively calling for the immediate and violent expulsion of all Jews from the area. dude idk she’s not my student anymore so I think I’m just going to disengage/not respond and continue staying off insta because it sucks out there!! but it sucks!

I also just refuse to experience a war via unfiltered social media posts again. I did that for a month or two at the start of the ukraine invasion and I can’t unsee some of the stuff I saw on telegram. I don’t actually think any of us have a moral obligation to watch or share a 24/7 feed of graphic images of maimed corpses and crying children. I can’t make the violence STOP by watching that content and I also don’t believe that ravenously consuming the most terrible moments of people’s lives is a form of meaningful political solidarity. WHATEVER as you can see I still feel super conflicted about how to feel about all of this but I also have to remind myself that IT’S NOT NORMAL to click through my stories or scroll down my feed alternating between liking people’s cat photos and watching people dying half a world away. we were NOT BUILT to process world-historical events this way and it is OKAY to opt out of watching a livestream of human suffering you are personally powerless to do anything about.

#I think it is fine to post a lot about an issue you are passionate about! she is clearly passionate about this! #but I hate that the active-posting crowd often acts like people who don’t do exactly the same thing are evil complicit or indifferent #I am so distressed about the state of the world right now!!!! #but I just don’t want to do politics like that it makes me feel so much worse and often makes me feel more powerless

[heydragonfly]

man i know the nature of social media at this point is to try and condense extremely complicated social and political issues into easy-to-digest mini infographies that lose all sense of nuance with the issue but uuuh gotta say y’all seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict be condensed into ten pictures with a couple sentences on each is A Lot

#and unsurprisingly it was filled with things that were either so biased to be bordering on misinformation or were just blatantly incorrect #bc hey guess what! what can be considered one of the most complicated conflicts in human history CANNOT be boiled down to TEN SLIDES #i mean jesus ‘Israel has only existed for 77 years’ i mean yeah TECHNICALLY but Zionist settlers have been in the region since the 1880s #and calling it a settler nation is just that’s a Whole Thing and it is nowhere near as simple as that #and talking about the nakba and the 1948 war without even saying those terms or putting them in context i mean jesus christ #and to have those condensed into like FOUR SENTENCES i mean COME ON #and to frame the conflict as israel being a settler nation who just needs to leave to free palestine is both tragically unrealistic #and a disservice to what freeing palestine actually means #like if you want to spread support for the issue talk about israeli settlements in the west bank!! #you can’t just throw out the term apartheid and not apply it to the west bank if that’s your argument #and talking about palestine without mentioning the terms west bank and gaza even once like???? #it’s just a whole bunch of misinformation framed as being for the free palestine moving but acting more as a detriment to it by not even #addressing the current state of palestinians #SORRY for all this im just whdhsjbd #i’m by no means an expert on this topic or anything close #i know enough to know how much i don’t know #but like posts like that are just dangerously misinformative about such a complex issue #and prey on peoples like of familiarity with the issue #which is to say if you’ve reblogged that post you’re FINE i’m irked with op or the person who made it #ash rambles

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Today the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol asked eight federal agencies for records. The chair of the committee, Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), gave the agencies two weeks to produce a sweeping range of material that showed the committee is conducting a thorough investigation of the last days of the Trump administration.

Thompson sent letters to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which keeps the records for the government; the Defense Department; the Department of Homeland Security; the Interior Department; the Department of Justice; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the National Counterterrorism Center; and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

While the House had previously asked the National Archives for all the records it had covering the events and federal actors involved in the events of January 6 itself, the select committee is using a much wider lens. It has asked the departments not just for records covering January 6, but also for those reaching back as far as April 1, 2020, to see if the Trump administration had plans to contest and ultimately, should he lose, overturn the election.

The committee has asked the departments for any records about plans to derail the electoral count, organize violent rallies, declare martial law, or use the government positions to overturn the election results. It has also asked for any “documents and communications” about foreign influence in the 2020 election through social media and misinformation.

And then there was this tidbit. The last items the committee asked NARA to produce were: “All documents and communications related to the January 3, 2021, letter from 10 former Defense Secretaries warning of use of the military in election disputes.”

That letter, which was published in the Washington Post and signed by all ten of the living former defense secretaries, warned that “[e]fforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” The letter reminded then–acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates that they were “each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”

It was an extraordinary letter, and its authors thought it was important enough to write it over the holidays, for publication three days before the January 6 electoral count. The driving force behind the letter was former vice president Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney (R-WY) sits on the House select committee.

Trump has threatened to invoke executive privilege to stop the release of the documents.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the committee’s action proved it is not looking for truth but rather is engaging in politics. The committee asked NARA for records of communications between the president and “any Member of Congress or congressional staff.” This will sweep in McCarthy, who had a heated conversation with Trump on the phone as rioters invaded the Capitol. “They come for members of Congress, they are coming for everybody,” he said.

But, in fact, such a sweep is precisely how scholars actually figure out what has happened in historical events. Limiting research before you know the lay of the land simply obscures the larger picture.

Just such a limiting view is on the table for the Republicans right now as they are proposing to investigate President Biden’s exit from Afghanistan if they regain control of the House in 2022, saying it “makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue.”

The first days of the evacuation after the Afghan army crumbled and the Taliban swept into control of the country in nine days were chaotic, indeed, but since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated more than 82,300 people, bringing out 19,000 people yesterday alone. It has evacuated at least 4500 U.S. citizens and has sent more than 20,000 emails and made more than 45,000 phone calls to Americans who had notified the embassy they were in the country (since Americans do not have to register with the embassy, it is unclear how many citizens are there). A rough estimate says there are probably 500 U.S. citizens who want to leave, while another 1000 are not certain or want to stay.

Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a press conference pointing out that the evacuation “is one of the largest airlifts in history, a massive military, diplomatic, security, and humanitarian undertaking,” and noted that “[o]nly the United States could organize and execute a mission of this scale and this complexity.”

Blinken said that the success of the airlift to date has been “a testament both to U.S. leadership and to the strength of our alliances and partnerships.” He reiterated that the Biden administration is not abandoning Afghanistan but is shifting its focus from military power to diplomacy, cybersecurity, and financial pressure. He said that the administration has worked hard to build alliances and that the U.S. will continue to work with allies both in Afghanistan and elsewhere going forward. He pointed out that the Taliban has made both public and private assurances that they will continue to allow people to leave the country, and that 114 countries—more than half of the countries in the world—have warned the Taliban that they must honor that commitment.

Tonight, it appears the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. Russia, which backed the Taliban in its struggle against the U.S. and which originally said Taliban control would restore stability to Afghanistan, has begun to evacuate its citizens from Kabul. And tonight, the U.S. government warned of security threats and urged U.S. citizens to leave the area around the airport immediately. According to a State Department spokesperson: "This is a dynamic and volatile security situation on the ground.”

When asked by a reporter about investigations into the evacuation, Blinken said he and the president accepted responsibility for it. He seemed fine with scrutiny of the last few months but suggested that that period should not be looked at in isolation if we are going to learn from our experience in Afghanistan. “[T]here will be plenty of time to look back at the last six or seven months, to look back at the last 20 years,” he said, “and to look to see what we might have done differently, what we might have done sooner, what we might have done more effectively.  But I have to tell you that right now, my entire focus is on the mission at hand.”

Today, President Biden signed into law H.R. 3642, the “Harlem Hellfighters Congressional Gold Medal Act,” giving the Congressional Gold Medal to the 369th Infantry Regiment, commonly known as the “Harlem Hellfighters,” in recognition of their bravery and outstanding service during World War I.

In that war, the 369th Infantry was made up of 2000 Black men, 70% of whom were from Harlem. Since many white men in Jim Crow America refused to serve with their Black comrades, army leaders assigned the unit to the French Army, where, although they still wore the U.S. uniform, they were outfitted with French weapons.

Sent into the field, they stayed out for 191 days, the longest combat deployment of any unit in the war. At the Second Battle of the Marne and Meuse-Argonne, the unit had some of the worst casualties of that mangling war, suffering 144 dead and about 1,000 wounded. “My men never retire, they go forward or they die,” said their commander, Colonel William Hayward. Germans called them the “Bloodthirsty Black Men.” The French called them “hell-fighters.” A month after the armistice, the French government awarded the entire 369th the Croix de Guerre.

And now, in 2021, the unit has, at long last, been awarded a U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.

Sometimes it takes a while, but accurate history has a way of coming out.

—-

Notes:

https://january6th.house.gov/news/press-releases/select-committee-issues-sweeping-demand-executive-branch-records

https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/20210825%20Exec%20Branch%20One%20Pager.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/532486-idea-for-former-defense-secretaries-warning-to-pentagon-originated-from-cheney-perry

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/10-former-defense-secretaries-military-peaceful-transfer-of-power/2021/01/03/2a23d52e-4c4d-11eb-a9f4-0e668b9772ba_story.html

https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/NARA.8.25.pdf

https://news.yahoo.com/january-6-committee-issues-sweeping-records-requests-to-federal-agencies-170505915.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/20/politics/house-republicans-afghanistan-biden-benghazi/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/january-6-committee-trump/2021/08/25/cd356794-059a-11ec-a654-900a78538242_story.html

https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-on-afghanistan/

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/08/25/politics/january-6-house-documents-investigation/index.html

http://werehistory.org/harlem-hellfighters/

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/24/storied-harlem-hellfighter-regiment-receive-congressional-gold-medal.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/25/1031088877/as-many-as-1-500-americans-in-afghanistan

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #capital insurrection #January 6 2021 #Croix de Guerre #Investigation #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson

[fictionplumis]

Fuck it, I’m writing more headcanons I have about Aiden and the Cat School witchers because fuck you, that’s why. 

It goes hand-in-hand with this post here where I first talked about how I see the mutagens affecting them, and I still stand by that but I’ve added more to my thoughts and made things a bit more complex. 

To start with, if I relate anything to a mental illness in a wrong way, please correct me. I am not neurotypical, neither is anyone I know, and I’ve taken a few psych classes, but I’m by no means an expert and the last thing I want to do is contribute to damaging stereotypes and spread misinformation. I also want to say that I’m not necessarily saying it’s any mental illness-like thing that makes Cat witchers the way that they are, but more the lack of knowledge/support/treatment/coping methods combined with the typical shit upbringing of a witcher that makes things so difficult for them. 

So there’s not much we actually do know about this school, not concretely anyway, and we’re also not sure how reliable the narrator is per se, because it’s very possible the stuff we do know about them is just rumors. My headcanon is that yes, most Cats are legitimately dangerous. Given that they act as assassins sometimes, I think their school teaches them to prioritize survival and money over all else, whereas I think School of the Wolf teaches their witchers that their duty is to protect. 

I was RPing with someone once who had this brilliant idea of Cats being taught to take contracts for monster nests, and then killing the monsters but leaving the nests so that when they passed through the next year, they would have another contract. In my version of the Cat School, that would absolutely be in line with their philosophy. In a lot of ways, they’re taught that humans are just another type of monster sometimes. They’re good when they’re paying you, but if they start doing the same shit monsters do, what’s the difference? With their heightened emotions, it means they’re capable of really deep empathy and connection to others, but their school teaches them to use that to manipulate people. Find out what motivates them, what words and phrasing you can use to convince an Alderman out of more coin, what emotions you need to appeal to in order to get a free room for the night, stuff like that. 

So let’s take a look at Karadin real quick. If we’re believing that Aiden is who Lambert says he is, then Karadin is obviously lying about why Aiden died. So what else is he lying about? 

Here’s a guy who was taught to survive above all else, to use his emotions and the emotions of others to manipulate them, who is good at gathering information. Him and his rag-tag group of assassins just took out this guy--reason doesn’t matter, it happened--and now they have a renegade Wolf after them. I doubt Lambert keeps quiet, you know? He wants information on what happened to Aiden, he’s going around pounding on doors and taking names, he’s making a scene. Karadin hears about it, we know that because he expected Lambert to show up. So how can he best protect himself? 

Firstly, cut all ties with his crew. Disband them. Become the guy who was into some bad shit but is now trying to clean up his life. Second, find out about the Wolf hunting them. Again, Lambert’s not exactly quiet. At the very least it wouldn’t be hard to find out that Lambert’s bitter about his life being a witcher, that he feels like his humanity was stolen was from. Why he feels that way doesn’t matter, it’s something Karadin can appeal to. Now he can become something that Lambert can sympathize with. Become the witcher that’s trying to leave the Path, start a family, and find his humanity again. You know about being a slaver, assassin, and wealthy merchant on the side, he has bank. So he pays a widowed mother to live with him, provides her and her kids food and shelter and safety, and all she has to do is pretend to be his lover for a little bit. After the heat cools down and he no longer has a Wolf looming over his shoulder, he can go back to his old life. What’s a couple years of laying low to a witcher, right?  Karadin’s mistake is not realizing that Lambert valued Aiden over any half-assed attempt to get his “humanity” back, and that he trusted and knew Aiden well enough to see through the lie. 

Anyway, that right there is the kind of shit the Cat school teaches. 

This, of course, makes Cats very hard to trust. And in turn, it makes Cats very suspicious of everyone else. If they can lie and manipulate like that, what’s stopping everyone else from doing it? It’s always possible. They don’t trust humans because humans have the tendency to be pretty shit (re: the attack on Stygga), they don’t trust the people in their school because all of those people know how to lie and manipulate just as easily as they do, and they don’t trust other schools look down on them. The one school they reluctantly get along with are the Vipers, because Vipers don’t look down on them. The others, especially the Wolves up in their mountain home? Oh, they’re up on their high horse, believing their way is the only moral way, banning anyone who doesn’t agree with them from the only safe place witchers have left, so fuck them. 

Then you pair this with the emotional instability. They have a hard time keeping their feelings consistent, which means they have a hard time keeping their opinions consistent. So maybe they set up camp somewhere they feel safe and an hour later they’re on edge and uncomfortable, and they can’t imagine how they ever felt safe there, and did they even feel safe there? They can remember they did, but they can’t emotionally connect to that memory now, maybe what they remember was back when they felt safe in a very similar camp, and not this one, they just mistook that memory to be this one. Or they take a contract and they decide, yeah, that’s a fair amount for this, this will be easy, even fun!. And then they do the contract and halfway through they’re like no, this is not fun, how the fuck did I think this would be fun, of course it’s not fun, and by the time they get to collect they’re reward, they’re demanding more but that was not worth the price they originally agreed on, I would never agree to do that for such a low amount. 

So essentially, the emotionally instability makes it very easy for them to gaslight themselves. 

Can’t trust others. Can’t trust themselves. Can’t trust their memories, or their feelings, or the decisions they make because they never know when all those things might change. 

Now let’s throw in paranoia, because the lack of trust is definitely a breeding ground for paranoia. It doesn’t help that people already whisper about and spit at witchers that pass by, but for a Cat on edge, everyone is doing that. That person laughing? Laughing at them. Those people talking? Plotting against them. Make eye contact with someone? What do they want? Is that a weapon? Are they planning something? 

And that right there is why so many Cats snap and go insane. It’s not just them lashing out because their emotions got the best of them, that’s would actually be a very small issue compared to this. This is why the rumor is a Cat that’s gone “feral” as to be killed. They work themselves into psychosis and even if you calm them down from the one instance, it’s nearly impossible to fix the way they now view the world. 

So enter Aiden. 

My headcanon is that he started out like any other Cat from his school. He did a lot of fucked up things because that’s what he was taught and he didn’t realize there was really anything wrong with it. He had no reason to question it, no reason to think his elders had taught him wrong, no reason to focus on anything but making money and staying alive. And then that changed. 

Why that changed is flexible, it could be anything, from something small that his ever-changing emotions conflated into something important that he fixated on, to something that is legitimately pretty life changing. I firmly believe that this thing doesn’t have anything to do with Lambert, though. This is before Lambert. Because the important part about Aiden being a good man, is that it’s something he decided to do on his own first. Then later, when he meets Lambert, Lambert helps him, helps him a lot, but the stuff that Aiden had already taught himself is the stuff that Lambert still needs to learn too, so they help each other. 

In my headcanon, the thing that sparked this for Aiden was the whole “leave the nest so you can come back next year” thing. He didn’t think much of doing it besides job security of sorts, and there was one town with a nekker problem that he popped through a few years straight to rid them of the nests that kept popping up. The people liked him because he was friendly and he took care of their problem every year. Aiden figured he could milk it until another witcher came along and destroyed the nests completely, but until then, their gratitude earned him a bit more coin than a monster nest usually would. And there was the carpenter’s son, who really liked him. Just a this spunky little kid who wasn’t afraid of a witcher, and who babbled to Aiden about being just like his dad when he got older, and who carved Aiden a little wooden sword one year as a thank you. And then Aiden came back through one year and the kid was gone. One of the first victims of the hatched nekkers that year. 

All at once it hit Aiden that his actions and nonactions had consequences. He had no kid babbling at him. The carpenter gave him a smile and a nod, but there was an emptiness to it. He had a mother sobbing into her hands thanking him for getting rid of the monsters that killed her son, unaware that it was his fault for leaving the nest in the first place. 

That gets Aiden to not only look at his own actions, but the actions of his school. At what motivates his brothers and sisters. How accountable they are for their actions. How aware they are of the damage it sometimes does. Whether or not they even care. And by looking at that, he sees the downward spiral that so many other Cats take, and he uses his high emotional intelligence and empathy to figure out why that happens, because he doesn’t want it to happen to him. So he has these coping mechanisms. Some are for the strong flashes of emotions that spark up and overwhelm him, but others are things for every day maintenance. He journals a lot. Writes down his circumstances, his feelings towards his circumstances, why he feels that way, the things he’s noticing, he writes down as much as he can so that if his feelings change and he has a hard time grasping how he felt differently before, he can go back and read it. It’s physical proof, right there, that his memories aren’t wrong. He did feel that way. Doesn’t now, but he did, and he can trust that he did because it’s right there. Then he can write down how his feelings have changed, and why they changed, and everything he can think of so he has another record of the situation if he needs to reference it. 

It helps a lot, especially when he reads back over everything from months ago. It helps him become more comfortable with just letting himself feel his emotions without getting as frustrated by all the changes, or stressed out at the idea that they will change. Because they always do, and it’s not always bad, he’s been through it before and he’s gotten on pretty well despite it. The fear he’s feeling at that time will change too, the frustration will change, he won’t always feel bad and yes, he’ll eventually stop feeling good but he’ll also always return to feeling good again eventually. 

Lambert helps him find some consistency, because out of everything, Lambert’s the one thing Aiden has never changed his mind about. Even when he’s angry and frustrated at Lambert, he still cares so fucking much. And the Wolf is always worth it. It’s this one point of consistency that Aiden doesn’t really need to function but holy fuck does it help. 

Meanwhile Lambert will start in about something, be keyed up and ranting while Aiden just calmly hums and watches him pace until Lambert tosses up his hands like, “I don’t even know why this pisses me off so much!” 

And Aiden blinks and goes, “Maybe it’s not just this issue that’s pissing you off. Maybe you’re also upset about other things. Does this remind you something similar that upset you, or has anything happened recently that this is adding to?” 

And Lambert doesn’t fucking know. How is he supposed to know what else he might be upset about? Lots of things upset him! And this is just like a million other situations, how is he supposed to know if one of those is similar enough to also be upsetting him right now?  “Well... Have you tried writing it down?”  “Have I tried what now?”  “Writing it down. You know. With a quill, in a book. A record of sorts, if you will. Of times you feel upset. So you can go back and read it to help you figure out what might be contributing to how upset you are currently.” 

The fact that Aiden says it with all the patience of someone talking to a child makes Lambert immediately dismiss the idea until the next time he gets pissed and he’s like fuck it, whatever, I’m buying a damn journal or whatever. And he does. And he writes down what he’s feeling, and is reluctant to admit that it makes him feel a little bit better, so maybe he does it a few more times, and then something else pisses him off and he writes that down too and then decides to flick back to the other pages and what do you fucking know, it’s kind of like that other time he was pissed. Not exactly, but he reads this one little detail that matches with his current situation that just agitates him to even read it and he’s like huh. I guess I really don’t like it when people say that. Yeah, you know what? I absolutely fucking hate it when people say that. The entire situation pisses me off, sure, but I wouldn’t be nearly as pissed if that guy didn’t say what he did!

Anyway. 

I don’t know a good way to end this but yeah there’s more of my thoughts on Aiden and the Cat School. Maybe I’ll write about headcanons regarding how I see school traits matching with the animal the school is based off of, because I see those headcanons often and while I agree with some, I’m picky and I do it differently.

#aiden #lambert #the witcher #lambden #laiden #catch me on the street corner ranting about aiden everyday #like some kind of guy with a sign proclaiming the end of the world #but its just I REALLY LOVE AIDEN #and i yell all of this while ringing a bell

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Laredo Part 2 Day 22

So the border is officially ‘closed’ again. We keep getting a lot of conflicting and unclear information, but it seems that the border will be closed either until July 30th or August 21st. I’ve read different reports with both dates.

Essentially asylum seekers are being blamed for the rise in COVID cases in south Texas, and the shelters are also being blamed as well. The news has been wild lately with unfounded accusations that the shelters drop COVID positive folks off at the airport and have them walk around town which is simply not true. There has been a few folks coming to the shelters to yell at staff and even give death threats to staff. I haven’t seen any of that first hand but the security staff has been working overtime and we’ve had to block out all the windows and doors of Holding to prevent people from trying to yell at or take pictures of folks.

If there is any blame to be placed on rising COVID cases it should be placed on ICE, whose blatant disregard for safety precautions, refusal to test or properly isolate folks for COVID, and keeping of folks in cramped conditions for weeks at a time with limited access to hygiene products puts asylum seekers at risk. Not to mention the Texas government which lifted the mask mandate months ago and the large amount of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers but I won’t go there.

This means that folks who are in detention will remain there until whenever ICE feels like releasing them and very very few new people will be allowed in. Today at Holding there were 7 people finishing out a quarantine but who will be leaving soon, and at La Frontera we had 10 people who all left today. We have no idea if there will even be anyone tomorrow or if ICE will randomly decide to release some folks.

I’m headed back home anyway the day after tomorrow. I’m bummed that border policy has taken this turn when there are so many people who are in such desperate need. Dumping all of this onto underfunded and understaffed shelters is not the answer but closing the border and keeping folks detained isn’t the answer either. There needs to be government funding and emergency relief funding allocated to support folks seeking asylum. They have a right to seek asylum as outlined by international law and as human beings we have an obligation to treat these folks with dignity and respect, not as criminals or ‘aliens’.

For today’s post I thought I’d get into some of the reasons why folks are being forced to leave their homes in the first place. This is a really complicated issue that people have spent their entire careers studying so please don’t take everything I say at face value, this is just what I’ve learned from my own research and from firsthand accounts of asylum seekers. I encourage folks to do their own research as well.

Most of the folks seeking asylum in the United States are coming from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. There has also lately been an increase of folks from Cuba and Haiti. Folks leave home for a variety of reasons. Frequently it is to escape extreme poverty and to find opportunities to work. Many folks leave because corrupt governments colluding with cartels have made their homes increasingly dangerous and unsafe. Many indigenous folks are persecuted by these governments and cartels as well. There has also been an increase of folks fleeing because climate change has caused natural disasters which make it impossible to stay in their homes (hurricanes, fires, flooding, water pollution, etc.).

It simply cannot be ignored that the majority of these conditions were caused directly by United States imperialism. The US government has a long and dirty history of interfering in foreign governments to suit their own purposes. Whether it is subsidizing corporations to buy up land and push out local farmers, inciting political instability through misinformation and funding of dangerous groups, or even in some cases assassination of democratically elected leaders in order to install another leader that would be more beneficial to US interests. This has happened all over the world (including but not limited to: Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, the list goes on and on).

For background information on Guatemala, I encourage you to look up “The Banana Wars” ( President Eisenhower colluded with The United Fruit Company, the CIA, and Guatemalan cartels to assassinate the democratically elected President Guzman and install a cartel supported puppet government loyal to US interests, resulting in US companies owning a lot of agricultural land in Guatemala, increased cartel violence, and increased hostility towards indigenous Guatemalans)

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdn6MHqd/

For background information on Honduras, look up Ronald Reagan’s involvement in Honduras in 1988, the U.S.S. Honduras of the 80’s, as well as Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the 2008 Honduras coup when she was Secretary of State.

https://theconversation.com/how-us-policy-in-honduras-set-the-stage-for-todays-migration-65935

For El Salvador, look up El Mozote Massacre and The Salvadoran Civil War. This war witnessed ‘death squads’ and fully trained militias that were paid for by the United States. There were militias of child soldiers recruited by the US government. The Carter and Reagan administration spent $1-2 million dollars DAILY to fund this war over the course of 12 years. This was supposedly to “prevent the spread of communism” but in reality it was to ensure that a government was installed that was loyal to US economic interests, particularly for coffee production. In 1980 Reagan sponsored a coup. The civil war continued until 1992 and its effects are still felt today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

For Nicaragua, again look up Reagan’s involvement in the 1980s, the ‘Dollars for Bullets’ policy, and the Sandinistas (a resistance group of Nicaraguans). The Banana Wars were also fought in Nicaragua, and there was a formal US military occupation of Nicaragua on and off throughout the 20th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Nicaragua

I won’t get into Cuba because this is an even more complex issue, but I encourage you to look into the effects that the current blockade has had on Cuba, the UN’s stance on the blockade, as well as the recent demonstrations against the Cuban government.

And finally, Haiti. Again super complex but I encourage you to look into the recent assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse as well as the natural disasters and flooding occurring due to climate change. I’d also recommend looking into the US occupation of Haiti in the 30s.

I could write a dissertation on this subject, and many already have. The long and short of it is that the United States is largely responsible for the conditions that are causing folks to be forced to flee their homelands. The US has manufactured economic and political instability and directly funded violent cartels and militias, installed dictators and assassinated presidents in order to protect US economic interests. We have absolutely no business denying them entry to the US or treating them the way we are treating them, not after what we have been doing to them for centuries.

I’ll get off my soapbox now I promise. But please if you have never heard of any of this before I encourage you to do some research on US imperialism. I took three advanced US history courses in high school and was never once taught anything about this.

Tomorrow is my last day volunteering at the shelters, and apparently a Texas state senator is planning on visiting La Frontera tomorrow morning to give a speech. I’m curious to see what they say.

I will try to post at least one more time before I leave on Saturday.

#laredo #texas #borderlands #immigration #asylum seekers #us imperialism

[hearts-kingdom]

@didilydee I really appreciate you critically considering my discussion points and showing an interest in not spreading misinformation! OP blocked me so my post debunking their’s wouldn’t show up in their notes where other people could see it being criticized and to ensure I couldn’t respond to their reblog directly so it would look like I failed to offer a counter argument in order to give the illusion of them being in the right since it would apparently be too much of an effort for them to engage in an actual discussion where their claims could potentially be debunked. In any case, since their response involved you I felt as though you might be interested in considering giving it a look :)

Start Photos

End Photos

I used this particular article because it was a convenient compilation of facts from various certified legal sources that’s geared towards relaying those facts— not unsourced gossip. It contains links and references to the court documents and other certified sources within the article and the judge is not the sole source within each point that relays facts— not opinions. Therefore, it’s not clickbait unless you consider summaries of legal documents and testimonies clickbait. If you see something specific that’s not a fact outside of the closing statement that includes the author’s opinion, you’re more than welcome to say so.

I didn’t spam every single person who reblogged it with tags— I only brought this to the attention of those who had posted their own comments implying they were open to a discussion given their willingness to reconsider things when presented with facts. Even then, I didn’t tag everyone who commented— only a handful of people. You act like I was making a callout post towards them when I said, “This isn’t a callout post of course I just wanted to bring this information to the attention of individuals I noticed were reblogging with comments. Dylan Farrow and Soon-Yi are often mixed up with each other so I can see how this might be confusing in that sense. You’re not obligated to reblog my fact-checks of course but please consider at least deleting OPs misleading post from your dash to prevent spreading misleading information”, which can be found in my reblog. If they want to say something, let them say it— you don’t have to put words in their mouth akin to how you’re putting words in mine given the unwarranted accusations you attempted to make throughout your post.

It’s very telling of you to claim people who make an effort to be informative when encountering misleading information are “loony” while also acting as though my request for others to consider information you refrained from relaying was a callout rather than a request. I generally refrain from making unwarranted accusations towards people I discuss things with, but given your reaction it’s evident I’m not the one with issues here, so don’t try to project your own problems onto people who consider things critically just because you expect them to believe you with ease and without question on a public platform given how that would be rather loony. Everyone else I’ve had a discussion with on this matter thus far have at least been receptive regardless of where they stand agenda-wise. However, your decision to block me so that my post debunking your own wouldn’t show up in the replies along with your decision to attack my rhetoric without giving me a chance to defend it or criticize your own is another story entirely.

Again, you clearly care more about pushing an agenda here through being selective about the facts you choose to relay rather than addressing the fact that you purposefully left out legal information that didn’t align with your own. Your comments about the #MeToo movement make that evident given how you didn’t address the fact that I said, “Both Woody Allen and Mia Farrow were horrible people and the abuse they committed should not be politicized for the sake of pushing a feminist nor anti-feminist agenda.” You’ve become so obsessed with spewing misleading information to push your own agenda that you’d rather jump through obstacles than acknowledge that your cherry-picking argument is based off of that very agenda rather than the facts that overshadow your personal bias.

It’s interesting that you said, “the words of the person known to have abused and manipulated”, in regard to Moses given how this is known because of his and his siblings allegations that didn’t result in Mia being imprisoned yet you still obviously believe these allegations— as people should given the evidence despite Mia trying to dispute as much. However, you’re dismissing the allegations of Dylan, her mother, three witnesses, and Woody’s therapist who saw him for inappropriate behavior towards Dylan before Woody was even caught cheating. Bringing attention to your hypocrisy isn’t idiotic but nice try.

It’s also odd but not unsurprising that you’re saying Moses should be trusted in regard to denying Dylan’s trauma since that evidently aligns with the agenda you’re trying to push here in favor of dismissing all the other witnesses and legal officials that conflicts with your argument— such as Dylan, Mia, the three witnesses whose timelines aligns with Dylan’s story, the judge, the state prosecutor, Woody’s therapist, Dylan’s pediatrician, investigating officers, and even the state attorney.

I want to reiterate what I said before: “I don’t doubt Moses Farrow was abused by Mia in the least, but the source also brings attention to how Dylan’s story aligns with [four] other peoples [accounts]— not just Mia’s. Moses likely wasn’t present during the assault [itself], so he can’t say she wasn’t assaulted anymore than Dylan can say he wasn’t abused.”

As for the New-Haven Sexual Abuse Clinic, if you actually bothered reading through the article’s legal sources, accounts, and testimonies then you’d know that the doctor who signed off on the legal report you’re referring to never actually met Dylan personally to make an in-person assessment, no psychologists or psychiatrists were assigned to her panel, the notes regarding her evaluation were destroyed, her confidentiality wasn’t respected, this institution welcomingly invited Woody to profess his innocence when they should have remained professionally unbiased, and the judge and state prosecutor deemed this claim as unacceptable given that.

As for your defense of how Woody being a pedophile and assaulting Dylan would have been irrational... yes— you’re right. That’s the point and yet you still missed it somehow. Pedophiles aren’t rational in the risks they take as pedophiles. Your rhetorical questions usually don’t bode well for defending people accused of pedophilia given how it relies on defending their character and the characters of pedophiles don’t have much worth defending since their judgements are skewered, impulsive, and dangerous.

As for inconsistencies, you fail to address the inconsistencies about Woody’s story changing and you honestly just dug a deeper hole for yourself in regard to the attic thing given how Woody’s story pertained to a police report in which he told them he’d never been in the attic before changing his story and saying he had gone up there before.

Oh, an on another note... demeaningly claiming that an issue as complex as this one is something people should “obvious[ly]” be able to make sense of in attempt to make people feel foolish for not unquestioningly agreeing with you is not a very good look at all. It’s dangerous to suggest people shouldn’t be critical of the concepts you push onto them.

I can quote things, too, but from multiple sources instead of just cherry picking ones that align with pushing a specific agenda.

Judge Elliott Wilk, the presiding judge in Allen’s custody suit against Farrow, concluded that there is “no credible evidence to support Mr. Allen’s contention that Ms. Farrow coached Dylan or that Ms. Farrow acted upon a desire for revenge against him for seducing Soon-Yi.”

In his 33-page decision, Judge Wilk found that Mr. Allen’s behavior toward Dylan was “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.”

“You look at her [Dylan] in a sexual way. You fondled her . . . You don’t give her any breathing room. You look at her when she’s naked.”

Another babysitter told police and also swore in court that on that same day, she saw Allen with his head on Dylan’s lap facing her body, while Dylan sat on a couch “staring vacantly in the direction of a television set.” A French tutor for the family told police and testified that that day she found Dylan was not wearing underpants under her sundress. The first babysitter also testified she did not tell Farrow that Allen and Dylan had gone missing until after Dylan made her statements.

The state attorney, Maco, said publicly he did have probable cause to press charges against Allen but declined, due to the fragility of the “child victim.”

#me too #metoo #feminism #anti feminism #woody Allen #Dylan farrow #Mia farrow #Moses farrow #feminismisahatemovement #anyways I’m blocking them back so they don’t unblock me to try to get a word in and then block me before I can reply again

[theramseyloft]

hello! im looking into buying pigeons as pets, I have experience with keeping pet birds but I want to get more specific knowledge on pigeons, how would you house them and what social grouping is best for them? and is it best to get younger pigeons if you want them to be more tame?

Pigeons require that you forget pretty much everything you know about any other species of pet bird.

The only thing they have in common is feathers and hollow bones.

Physical needs are dirt simple to meet.

Pigeons are strict granivores. 

They are not capable of digesting anything other than embryonic plant issue.

Once the plant sprouts, they can no longer process it.

So no sprouts, no fruit, no veggies, no leaves, no roots, no stems, no tubers, NOTHING BUT SEEDS!!!!

They do not have the internal organs required to process cellulose.

I’m really sorry to hammer it in like that, but so many people going from pretty much any other species of bird to pigeons make really dangerous mistakes by using the nutritional and habitat rules for their other birds as the base line.

Even vets do this more often than not, because every one’s base line for Companion bird is parrot.

SO many people advocate that pigeons be forced to eat fruits and veggies as if they were parrots.

Their owners, who trust this wide spread misinformation and are only doing what their vet tells them, end up worried that their pigeons are not getting the right blend of nutrients when they refuse those things that are NOT food for them. 

To make the birds eat “enough” veggies, their owners are advised to restrict their seed intake, because “seeds should just be treats for birds, not a dietary staple, or they’ll die of fatty liver disease.”

In the specific cases of Pigeons (Columba livia) and Ringneck Doves (Streptopelia risoria), the poor birds are accidentally starved on a full stomach by people who “Have bird experience” and are genuinely doing their best to take the best care of their pigeon, going by what they already know from other species, encouraged by the advice of their vet.

Please, do not do this to your Columbidae.

Give them a wide variety of seeds, black oil sunflower sized or smaller, that include grains and legumes. 

Dried split green peas and lentils are good legumes to supplement a widely varied seed mix.

Unpopped popping corn is a pleasant treat for many.

Safflower seeds are irresistible training treats to most.

The columbidae do not hull their seeds. They swallow them whole, shell and all, and are dependent on the shells for dietary fiber.

So avoid hulled blends advertised as “mess free.”

Pretty much all commercially available cage for birds are built to display sitting parrots, or contain a little flock of finches.

Pigeons are primarily ground foragers that are not physically capable of climbing, but nest on cliffs.

They need more floor space than height, and flat perches because round ones hurt their feet.

Perches need to have at least a full body length between them, so if there is not space for that, only have one perch in the enclosure.

A training crate for a Labrador sized dog is plenty of space for most breeds of average (about homer) size or smaller.

Larger, taller, or longer winged breeds like Giant Homers, Utility Kings, Voorburg Shield Croppers, Frillbacks, Lagore, and a few others will need a kennel built for Great Danes

The perches in the photo above are modified Garden Stakes (Nearly always square and wooden) cut to legth.

The nest boxes are bunny/ferret corner litter boxes filled with straw.

If you are planning to have a few as pets, rather than a breeding loft, they do best if you think of caging like you would crating a dog:

The crate is not intended to be where the dog lives full time.

It’s where the dog sleeps or waits out the time you are away or otherwise unavailable to supervise out time; while they are still learning the house rules.

When you are home, the dog is let out, and you alternately praise or reprimand them depending on how they interact with your things.

The end goal is for the dog to free roam the house full time, knowing what they are not allowed to mess with, what they are allowed to interact with, and how they are allowed to interact with the things they are allowed to interact with.

Pigeons are exactly as capable of learning house rules, and can get to a point where they are trust worthy free roaming either full time, or during the day.

It’s useful to think of free roam training like you would with a dog or cat, but pigeons have the intelligence of a five year old human child, and a social structure that legitimately can be called a society and is strikingly similar to a close knit extended family of humans.

Pigeons are intensely social. 

They don’t just breed in colonies.

They live in colonies year round that forage cooperatively.

They have a crazy efficient chain of command.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150609213053.htm

Whose leaders earn their following by proven merit

https://www.audubon.org/news/in-homing-pigeon-flocks-bad-bosses-quickly-get-demoted

Every flight capable individual has a vote in what the flock does when they leave the home loft.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100416214045.htm

It is not an exaggeration to call a pigeon flock a democratic meritocracy.

And because of that, Pigeons innately expect not just to have a voice in the social group they are part of, but to be aware of that voice being ignored.

Pigeons are incredibly vocally and behaviorally communicative.

This study of sea birds proves that at least some birds are capable of communication through the shells of their eggs.

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/baby-birds-communicate-eggs-hatch?fbclid=IwAR39CYrHAfFM6nAP8Rq3TvOox1p5vcb3Z87xqjPoiYNCwMoRvuQaWCeSFjs

Though there have not been pigeon specific studies done, I have noticed babies hatching with more obvious anxiety during stressful periods for the loft, so I have reason to believe that parents communicate with unhatched chicks, and unhatched chicks can communicate with eachother.

Pigeons have higher level cognition. 

They share come cognitive traits with baboons

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090212141143.htm

But they share a shocking number of cognitive traits with humans!

Brain wiring, for example.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130717095336.htm

Facial recognition

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110411171847.htm

Complex categoroization

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140402095107.htm

They are one of the very few animals (Including corvids, but excluding most parrot species) that are self aware enough to recognize themselves not just in mirrors, but in videos, even with a delay.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613145535.htm

They can even learn the equivalent of words by the same mechanic as human toddlers.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150204184447.htm

This study is the basis of a communication study I have been doing with our birds for almost two years now.

Earlier, I talked about flocks being democratic meritocracies, and how aware pigeons innately are of their vote being ignored.

The more ignored a pigeon feels, the less cooperative they are inclined to be.

But the more they understand of the world around them and how their behavior effects it, the faster they learn which of their behaviors effect what and how to change their behavior to effect changes they want.

By verbally talking them through everything in the simple, clear way that you would for a toddler who has not yet picked up many words for things, you can teach a pigeon to understand your verbal communication.

With a bit of patience, you can also forge those associations using written words. Pigeons have proven capable of learning the difference between acronyms and actual words.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160919111535.htm

They have also proven to understand abstracts like space and time

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171204144805.htm

Pigeons risk/reward evaluation is even strikingly similar to ours, compelling them to gamble on a bigger reward, once they have experienced the possibility of receiving one, than to stick to the guarantee of a consistent, but small pay out.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140827092105.htm

Building a trusting relationship with a pigeon is more like adopting a tiny, nonverbal human toddler who can fly than training any other type of domestic pet.

It’s easier for a younger bird to learn than an adult, because a younger bird has less ingrained behaviors that they need your help to unlearn, but with patience, any pigeon of any age can build a close relationship with you on the dual basis of trust and communication.

I have lots of asks about training that go into more detail.

Try searching the terms Training, Socialization, Bonding, and Friends.

I don’t have the option to tag asks. I have to go back and edit them after I have posted them in order to add a tag, and I often forget.

Especially when I have a long backlog!

For reference, t time of writing, I have 21 asks waiting to be answered. 

[manunliving]

Thoughts on "Independent Research"

As an educator who teaches rhetorical argument, the seemingly exponential rise of misinformation and disinformation practices over this past year is disheartening. It could be argued that these issues were always there, and certainly there is merit to this argument. However, they were not nearly as pervasive until social media made it easier to simply remain misinformed than to actually critically approach an issue.

My main concern is with the concept of research being lobbed about. This is largely because part of critical thinking and rhetoric is in fact learning to research information, and so the rise of the "conduct your own research" mentality feels very much like a personal attack. And that is, perhaps, quick to the core of the problem: feelings. Research has no true emotional core. Actual research and professional researchers know to separate their personal feelings from the work. After all, in scientific research, the goal is rarely ever to validate one's beliefs or theorem, but to attempt to disprove what is believed or thought. If this attempt to disprove cannot be done, then ultimately what is left has a stronger grain of truth.

But whenever I see the phrase "independent research," it is almost always connected to an article that was just shared from another social media poster and glanced at by the sharer, or a video of a compelling but ultimately unsubstantiated speaker speaking buzz words and jargon that sound official. Research goes beyond the content of the document or video and digs into context, the true home of critical thought and meaning. I could tell you right now that I am a scientist who has studied respiratory problems for years, then immediately follow it up with scary sounding words like "cancer" or "hyper-transmissible" or tell you that breathing in smoke is a harmless way to burn out infected tissue. But the real problem here is that this claim would be a lie. Without taking the time to look into who I am as a writer, who I represent, how I may benefit from the written words of my content, and who may be supporting my work financially, all you have to go off of is how my words make you feel, and that is dangerous.

In rhetoric, there are three primary paths to reaching one's audience. The one that is most pervasive, and sadly the most effective in the short-term, is the appeal to emotion. Get them laughing, crying, fearing, angry, and you can get them to react. And this is the current state. Parties interested in perpetuating misinformation have worked diligently to ensure that this reactionary response is where most viewers stop. The common thread in most of these misinforming posts is "You cannot listen to X person, because the system itself is designed to corrupt." And this brings us to the second audience appeal: an appeal to authority and credibility, which misinformation attacks, very successfully. The truth is, I have read many studies surrounding medical issues & treatments. Some have been fantastic and enlightening into how to combat potentially deadly illness. Others are designed to simply engender an "us versus them" fallacy within the reader by pulling at the distrust and fear already present. Unfortunately, verifying credibility is a far slower process than simply reacting to a feeling, and so cunning liars can spread misinformation at a rate that is significantly higher than those interested in the truth can fact check.

And this brings me to the third appeal: an appeal to logic and fact. Two words that have become twisted in recent years by malicious demagogues. A fact must be empirically proven, but the meaning of the word in the vernacular lexicon has eroded until most recognize it as an alternative for any data point. Like with the appeal to authority, a good faith appeal to logic takes time and work. One cannot arrive at empirical truth immediately, and humans do not deal well with uncertainty. It is understandable why an article posted online that validates a believed thing would be comforting when the alternative is to accept a sort of powerlessness. But as an outsider to research, this powerlessness in the initial moments is an uncomfortable reality that needs to exist. To counter those with malicious intent, studies and articles need to be peer reviewed by experts in the field to disprove or confirm the findings of the initial study. And these peers have studied for years. Study in science is not a passive, laid-back approach. It is a process of curiosity and discovery, constantly evolving in ways that challenges the human understanding of reality.

And let me reiterate: this part is important. If a human does not regularly engage in critical self review, critical thought, and acts of curiosity guided by experts then engaging with research can be dangerous. It is easy to misinterpret results. I warn students quite often that when they present statistics in essays they need to be extra careful about how they frame the sentences around it. After all, complex considerations must be made about a study's population size, methods in the evaluation process, and how the researchers dealt with outliers and anomalies. I may be an expert in rhetorical reasoning and the written word, and an academician who values the scientific process, but I concede that when it comes down to the evaluation of scientific findings even I have to rely on those who are experts in the given field to help me understand what I am encountering.

Maybe that is really what is going on here: a sort of arrogance has taken root. A sense of rampant independence that to rely on another is to be weak. Asking for help, regardless of task, is difficult. Thanks to decades of propaganda, it feels almost anti-American to admit what seems like a weakness. It is easier to google a question or statement that is loaded in a way to bring back results that are ready to whisper in your ear, "Yes, you are right, it is the world that is wrong." But research is not easy. It takes time, and effort, and frustration quite often. It cannot be completed in most cases within a single day, and it certainly cannot be completed while sitting alone on a couch, or in a coffee shop, or on the toilet. If all your research returns to you are a string of articles that say you are right while so many others have it wrong, then I say instead to try and prove yourself wrong and remember to find out who it is that are writing these articles. Not everyone is an expert, and not everyone has good intentions.

[jspark3000]

(Pt.1) Could you maybe identify what policies or laws are racist? Or perhaps you could elaborate on the part where you said you encountered people who were limited from jobs, housing, custody rights, resources due to racism. What happened for you to come to that conclusion? I’m not dismissing you but asking genuinely. If there is something racist about our systems, I would like to know too. Trust me. Please don’t feel rushed or pressured to respond to these right away btw

Hello there, you’re referring to this post.

Here’s part 2 of your question: Pt.2 I think many are just concerned that all disparities/suffering are seen to be a result of sys. racism. This may not be helpful when addressing complex/multifaceted issues. There are many Black & non-Black voices alike who are truly concerned about the problems and suffering in the Black community but do not agree with the systemic racism narrative, but they are silenced/cancelled. I say this with respect, but why give yourself the authority to assume another’s intentions? Ty for answering

—

I think these are excellent questions, and I’d like to gently point out two things.

1) I have received dozens of messages and comments like yours with the exact same phrasing. Really. It’s eerie. It’s to the point where I wonder if they’re all coming from the same individual. You used keywords like elaborate, asking genuinely, and just concerned. The whole Just Asking Questions type of concern trolling is practically a meme by now, in which you’re “not dismissing” the issue and that “many Black and non-Black” people are “truly concerned about” not buying into the “narrative.”

Now I’m not saying you’re a concern-troll. You may be genuinely interested in these answers. Certainly I’d like to think so. I’m simply weirded out at how often I get these sorts of messages with the same sort of “what about” type of curiosity, with the same words verbatim, like a preprogrammed script. I have had this conversation many, many times. It never goes well, mostly because it’s not seeking to learn, it’s seeking to win.

I’ll try to save some time. This is usually how the conversation goes: I’ll bring up redlining, or Jim Crow laws, or how the super predator laws in the 90s still disproportionately affect Black individuals today, or that proportionately a Black individual is 2.65 times more likely to be killed by police than a white individual, or multiple experiments have shown that a “Black-sounding” name with the same exact resume as a “white-sounding” name is statistically less likely to get the same job, or that Black individuals are far more likely to be given greater sentences for the same exact crimes, or impoverished Black communities also trap these communities into less funded education, which has trapped generations with fewer resources. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Then you’ll systematically attempt to discredit every one of my sources (I didn’t post them because at this point, who even reads them anymore), you may say I’m a radical leftist or antifa or that my numbers are off or that I’m not seeing the bigger picture, you’ll quote the 13/50 statistic, you’ll point me to Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens or PragerU or Steven Crowder or even Shaun King for some reason, you’ll tell me about the dangers of welfare and the need for personal responsibility, you’ll bring up Chicago and black-on-black crime, you’ll tell me you agree with protests but hate rioters, you’ll bring up David Dorn and “what about Tony Timpa,” you’ll say Ferguson was a fraud and Nick Sandmann is proof of deep state, you’ll eventually tell me that Black people got themselves into this mess and need to dig their way out and they need to “get off the government teat” and “stop having kids” and “stop making excuses”—and the whole time you’ll tell me you’re just concerned and Just Asking Questions.

I mean, this is always how it goes. Maybe you’ll surprise me? But in the end, probably neither of us will change our minds. You’ll tell your friends you tried. You’ll use me as an example of close-mindedness. You’ll most likely never look up any of these stats. If our conversation goes differently than this, then I am very glad to be wrong.

Perhaps I’m being too jaded and cynical. I apologize that I sound so tired (my daughter is turning three weeks old tomorrow and it’s been exhausting). It’s just—someone who doesn’t believe in systemic racism despite the evidence probably has an entire worldview that must support this anti-view, no matter what. I’ve already said that systemic racism exists plus there is social responsibility involved. It can be both. But to invalidate the former simply destroys all available potential for learning how to best heal. No, I don’t think you’re a bad person for not believing in systemic racism. But misinformed? Yes.

So as much as I love to build bridges, I find it hard it to trust that these conversations are real dialogue. They seem to me some kind of secret conversion tactic, or trying to make an example of me. If you’re really, really concerned, then my hope is you take some days and weeks to enter these situations and find out for yourself.

2) I would like to kindly address your statement here: “I say this with respect, but why give yourself the authority to assume another’s intentions?”

So this is the third time you’ve said “You’re assuming my intentions,” and this time you said “why give yourself the authority to assume another’s intentions.”

I am not a therapist, but I think you may be inadvertently reenacting the Karpman Drama Triangle. I’ve done the same thing, and it took me years of therapy and mentoring to overcome this. Basically, the Karpman Triangle creates a dynamic of Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer. By constantly saying “you’re assuming my intentions,” you’ve placed me in the role of the Persecutor and yourself as the Victim. This was obvious when you said “why give yourself authority”—by using a lite ad hominem to call me the authority, you’ve now placed yourself in the innocent hapless role of victim. By turn, you now will eventually become the Rescuer by saving yourself through my conversion or yourself from the “persecution.”

Now this is only my speculation and you may not know you’re doing this, if you’re even doing this at all. I’m saying this to you because, well, I’m concerned. You may have been deeply affected by certain family dynamics or trauma to reenact the Karpman Triangle. I’ve unfortunately re-enacted this Triangle many times, and perhaps even did so unwittingly in some of these posts. But it’s good to get some counseling for this; please believe me on that. Re-enacting the Triangle can seriously affect all your relationships and will make it much harder to have real conversations or to challenge your beliefs. I would know: it has nearly ruined me many times. Even if you’re not in the Triangle, I still highly advise counseling anyway. If you’re in counseling already, I would bring this up and see if this rings true for you.

— J.S.

#race #racism

[gortonben]

Week 3: Risks in Social Media

There are risks to just about everything and social media is no exception. It may seem harmless, but there are many potential dangers when using social media. The biggest risk to using social media, although it is not so obvious, is having your information getting exposed to the public. Information privacy is a hot topic in this day and age and it is making social media users less trustful of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as it should. Big Data, the storage and analysis of large and or complex data sets, is at the heart of the information privacy dilemma. This data comes from users and there is not much users can do to stop this. Big data and algorithms are helpful for sure. For example, big data and algorithms allow us to prevent disease and disaster and make decisions, but there is fear that they are too powerful of a tool to be trusted. Information can be used for the better but it can also be used for the worse, meaning against someone or something. With big data comes security and privacy issues. If big data is in good hands within a corporation, all is ok (unless you don’t want businesses to know your private information, as most people don’t). However, if big data falls into the wrong hands, that is when you might see instances of phishing, scams, and misinformation. These are examples of some ways in which big data is dangerous. 

Then there is algorithms. I feel that the movie The Social Dilemma did a good job of depicting how algorithms can be used in a negative way. For example, in the movie, it focused on how social media companies use algorithms to try and get people addicted to their platform. Facebook was an example used. Justin Rosentein, creator of the “like” button, was one of the people interviewed throughout the course of the movie. He claims that the “like” button was created to spread positivity. It certainly can be used as such. However, it has caused harm and will likely continue to do so. Particularly, it has caused harm to teenagers. There have been increased cases of anxiety and depression in this age group, in part due to the like button. As I stated in a previous post, if you are active on social media in high school, you may be seen as more popular. Popularity is a big thing in high school and most people know this. The same thing can be said for likes. If you get a lot of likes, you’re seen as popular. As a result, teenagers are frantically trying to get a lot of likes, creating an anxiety. 

Altogether, these problems can be dealt with on a personal, professional, and societal level. Personally, I feel that the best way to handle these problems would be to abandon social media altogether. From a professional standpoint, social media simply needs to be used professionally. Big data and algorithms just have to be used for the better and not in a way that could harm someone. It’s as simple as that. From a societal standpoint, people need to be less concerned about likes and more concerned about big data and how it can negatively affect us. 

[arcticdementor]

The last few weeks have been a profoundly radicalizing experience.

Before the COVID-19 crisis entered into its current phase, it was reasonable to argue that the post-2016 counter-disinformation effort was based on good intentions but had serious flaws and was entering a state of diminishing returns. The Internet and social media, in destabilizing traditional gatekeepers and spreading lies and half-truths, had created a dangerous vacuum that was being filled by malicious actors. You could disagree with the details of the diagnosis and prognosis, and disagree even more with the proposed treatments, but the underlying assumptions themselves at least could be said to have validity. But what a difference a few weeks makes.

The COVID-19 fiasco is revealing, in a very short period of time, that much of these assumptions are totally wrong. And continuing to act on them is not just misguided but harmful. Doing so compounds the costs of the failures that we have witnessed and hampers efforts that – however imperfect – provide alternatives to them. Why?

…

It is difficult to express how badly almost all legacy “expert systems” simultaneously underperformed during the initial phases of the crisis. Here is a tiny sample of this failure, a failure whose human consequences grow by the day as a cold, inhuman, and utterly ruthless killer relentlessly searches for new targets.

…

It is an exaggeration to say that fringe weirdos on social media often were more well-informed than people that exclusively evaluated mainstream sources, but not that much of an exaggeration as most would think. And that is not accidental. As Ben Thompson noted, the global COVID-19 response depended on an enormous amount of information developed and shared often in defiance of traditional media (which underrated and even mocked concern about the crisis) and even the Center for Disease Control (which attempted to suppress the critical Seattle Flu Study). The response still depends primarily on transnational networks and often must operate around rather than through official channels.

Taken together, all of this is astounding in both its scope and simultaneity. And it makes a mockery out of the cottage industry developed over the last few years to preserve our collective epistemic health.

…

But as we have seen, these institutions are perfectly capable of unraveling themselves without much help from Russian bots and trolls and Macedonian teenagers. And if the fish rots from the head, then the counter-disinformation effort becomes actively harmful. It seeks to gentrify information networks that could offer layers of redundancy in the face of failures from legacy institutions. It is reliant on blunt and context-indifferent collections of bureaucratic and mechanical tools to do so. It leaves us with a situation in which complicated computer programs on enormous systems and overworked and overburdened human moderators censor information if it runs afoul of generalized filters but malicious politicians and malfunctioning institutions can circulate misleading or outright false information unimpeded. And as large content platforms are being instrumentalized by these same political and institutional entities to combat “fraud and misinformation,” this basic contradiction will continue to be heightened.

The cardinal sin motivating all of this is worrying about whether we trust institutions without asking if these institutions normatively deserve trust, whether it is possible for trust to emerge in the absence of agreement about underlying causes of social problems, and most importantly how subjective trust in authorities can be achieved without objective action.

…

Don’t think carefully. Trust expertise. Sit down and go back to watching television. You’ll only make things worse if you do anything. Many of these op-eds – which now have aged horribly in very short periods of time – emphasized public cognitive deficits in evaluating risk. But a novel virus – in a climate of partial and often distorted information – is not so much a problem of risk as much as it is an issue of uncertainty. Uncertainty nonetheless requires bold action, even if action must occur in conditions where even post-hoc information may not fully reveal all of the relevant decision parameters. And more importantly, responsibility is not equal. The nature of the modern ‘risk society’ is such that the impact of individual actions are swamped by those of large institutions and risk is often systematically passed off to society’s losers.

…

Western society fetishizes the appearance of leadership even as actual leaders recede into a malfunctioning technocratic machine that prunes individual agency and leaves behind only a phantom limb sensation of what once was, Hobson and Bristow explain

…

But is there an alternative to this? What can we do? This post will not give a pat answer, but it will once again reference Thompson’s observation about how the Internet fulfilled much of its original promise and other more traditional information management systems underperformed.

…

What it means is that in the next crisis, reliance on legacy institutions alone to save us is a collective suicide pact. Tradeoffs are inevitable in any complex endeavor, and as Thompson has argued we need to tilt the balance further towards opening up control of information transmission and communication in spite of what we have painfully learned about the false promise that technology will save us from ourselves. This is not about salvation, it is about survival. Reframing the question offers much clarification about possible answers and takes us away from debates that have become stale and uninformative.

We need only look back, as Thompson does, to the origins of the Internet to see that beneath the hyperbole about digital life washing away everything else is a basic concern for survival and resilience under severe strain. And this is the best place to start before we do anything else. In the long run, we must repair or rebuild the legacy systems that failed. Starting over from scratch is simply not an option. “Year Zero” approaches are tremendously destructive and attempts at creating planned societies ex nihilo do not work. But in the short and near term we must create alternatives. These alternatives can over time help us make older systems better. And, quite frankly, building robust alternatives may provide legacy institutions with the incentive to either rise to their obligations or be rendered irrelevant.

Waiting for them to get better on their own or hoping they will change without being prodded is like waiting for the authorities to tell you the right time to stock up on quarantine supplies. Don’t bet your life on it.

#adam elkus #read the whole thing

[notchainedtotrauma]

thank you for talking abt the issues on infographics on instagram! I've been uncomfortable and worrying about it privately and you've put words to some of my concerns which means a lot. i hope you don't get hate for it but i also hope i can tell you that one (1) person found your thoughts incredibly helpful

Thank you for sending me this message. I admit that when I saw that I received something in my inbox, I expected hatred. Like I’m not targeting anybody or sending hatred to anybody. But badly framed information can be and is worse than no information at all, and Instagram isn’t designed to give you complex information. It just isn’t. 

You can curate art on Instagram but expecting it to give you all the information you need is dangerous and the way the information is framed in those infographics misses details that actually matter a whole lot. 

Also I’m sorry, but citation is a question not only of showing your information is legitimate but it’s also an ethical necessity. And once again that’s where Instagram fails as a format for that kind of thing. I have been seeing those infographics being reblogged and not one of those I saw had a works cited page. None. That’s a problem. And don’t tell me that saying that the “descendants of” or the “the women that” is citation because you still don’t name people. 

And if you want to ask me what I’m doing, you can go through my archive where the vast majority of the art I curate has the the artist’s name hyperlinked to their website, the quotes I transcribe from videos or get from articles on the Internet have the name of the piece they come from hyperlinked most of the time. And if you go through the most recent public posts on my Patreon, I have a Notes thing even for poems where I cite my references and my inspirations.

Like if people want to feel hurt and personally targeted, that’s their problem. My concern, in those times of constant misinformation, is that if people want to learn, that they have easy access to accurate, sourced information that respects the complexity of the issues at the heart of the matter. That is all.

[scripttorture]

A question for you., in regards to that last thing. Do you think serial killers wouldn't develop any symptoms for torturing people if they only did it, say once maybe twice a week? Because if the scale isnt even close, they wouldn't suffer the same consequences? Are then they not even closely related to torturers? Do you think thst peoples obsession with serial killers could hang over the true realities of torture, since media always focuses on them instead? (Thank you so much)

Honestly? Not enough data.

 I don’t think there is currently a consistent, working definition of ‘serial killer’ and that means that judging their symptoms as a class or making a comparison is virtually impossible.

 Frankly I think we’d be better off comparing torturers to people like soldiers and firefighters. That’s because we don’t really know the level at which violence starts to effect most people.

 A comparison to people whose exposure to violence we can track and measure would help to establish when most people begin to be effected. It might also help to establish whether some symptoms are actually more common in particular circumstances and why that might be.

 If we had that information then I think it would be possible to estimate whether serial killers would have symptoms or not.

 But right now- so far as I know, we don’t have that information.

 The scale isn’t even close. But we don’t yet know what scale of abuse leads to symptoms for the majority of the population. We do know that past experience can effect it and that a few symptoms are more likely in particular circumstances (ie PTSD is more likely if someone is hurt themselves then if they witnessed someone else being hurt).

 I don’t personally feel that’s enough information to do more then make an educated guess.

 That’s really as much as I can say for the first three questions because it’s as much as we know so far.

 I don’t think serial killers are closely related to torturers. At all.

 I think that the circumstances surrounding them are just… too different for the comparison to make sense. Torturers are fundamentally shaped by the communal aspect of the abuse they inflict. They are not loners. They don’t make the decision to hurt other people individually or in a vacuum.

 They do it because they exist in an environment that either encourages or ignores abuse while not giving them the training/tools to deal with the problems they face in a practical way.

 Torture is a function of organisations, of broken systems. Murders are not.

 I don’t always talk about organisations in every post but- A serious discussion of torture demands an examination of organisations.

 Murders can be influenced by the cultural climate they take place in but they can still be seriously examined, as a phenomena, outside of that specific context. Torture can’t be.

 It isn’t just that without the organisational context it ceases to be legally torture. It’s about the way systems influence and encourage behaviour. It’s about the way torturers band together while competing with each other. The way they egg each other on and sow discord among the rest of the organisation. The way they fracture the systems they’re part of.

 Serial killers, despite what the media says, don’t leave rifts in communities the way torturers do. I say this because I have yet to hear of a case where serial killers led to members of a community trying to murder each other. And torturers have caused large enough fractures in military organisations that soldiers on the same side have turned on each other.

 I can sometimes help people who are writing serial killers; in the sense that I can advise them about the damage different types of abuse cause, the long term effects on survivors and how to handle things like a survivor’s recovery. But I can’t really offer much helpful advice on serial killers themselves. It’s just not my area.

 As for the media- I think that’s a very difficult question to answer. Partly because it’s very firmly rooted in a culture that I’m not part of.

 Trying to judge a foreign culture that you don’t know a lot about from the outside is incredibly tricky. My impression is that cultural focus on and obsession with serial killers is almost uniquely American. And I’m not American.

 Globally, I would say that most people do not understand torture and do not take it seriously.

 But I could say the same about slavery and I don’t think either fact is purely down to the issues being eclipsed in the media.

 I think it is primarily down to a lack of good quality, accessible information.

 Which is part of why I’m here. Because right now? Most people, torturers included, get their information from fiction.

 And that fiction is generally wrong. Often not intentionally. It is repeating the same tropes and cliches we’ve been using for hundreds of years.

 It’s a little like seeing modern medical dramas with doctors talking about balancing the humours instead of- you know, infection.

 May be serial killers do get more air time then torturers where you are. But torturers aren’t really discussed seriously anywhere. My experience is that attempts to discuss torture are often full of misinformation and apologia. Even when they’re well meaning.

 A lot of people who oppose torture assume it can lead to accurate information when it can’t. A lot of people assume torture always leaves external scars. A lot of people assume survivors are dangerous.

 So I think that the misunderstandings and apologia around torture, the lack of understanding and the lack of empathy: I think that would still exist without any media discussion of serial killers. Because it exists in cultures without any focus on serial killers.

 The question of how to tackle that ignorance and apologia doesn’t have a simple answer. There are multiple schools of thought and I think a lot of them have merit.

 As a scientist I think giving people access to research and knowledge is a big factor.

 As an author I can’t ignore the role fiction plays in propping up apologia in the real world.

 But these aren’t the only factors. The way the law treats torture makes a difference. The way the media covers it does too. The lack of funding for research. The lack of support for survivors. The lack of visibility of survivors in our cultures and communities. The lack of political will to tackle the problem. The lack of interdisciplinary communication. The lack of communication and coordination across charities.

 And I think part of tackling these issues, torture, slavery- is accepting that they are complex and that we can not individually tackle them on all fronts. We push forward where we can, because small improvements add up.

 We do what we can.

 Stepping back from a focus on serial killers might be part of that in your country. But my personal opinion is that building up more general knowledge about what torture is, what it does, why it doesn’t work- is more important.

 I hope that helps. :)

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #writing torturers #behaviour of torturers #torture and organisations #torture apologia #tackling torture apologia #serial killers

[thinkingagain]

The Demesne was awakened early that same morning by a buzzing roar. In a space of a few seconds, all the grounds were covered by grasshoppers. Millions. They began decimating every piece of vegetation available.

Sir Sleepy of the Bunny Nest (A Novel of the Revolution) Book Two: Empire Chapter 34

The next morning, the Commandant’s submarine fleet moved into action. The plan of the three subs was to further erode several large coral reefs in a way that damaged the fragile life along the reefs. Damage would be blamed on the U.S. Navy in an attempt to goad a Magic Animal response.

All information about the plan was rigorously scrambled, but Basil had cracked multiple codes and Lucky had pierced through many layers of muffling surrounding the communications technology. Together they deciphered all the relevant details.

The submarines hadn’t gone far from their base when the crew discovered a host of small problems in their operating abilities, none detected during checks prior to launch: clogged drains and ventilation systems, malfunctions in the weapons and honing devices, loose wires, seaweed stuffed into the engines. The mission had to be postponed.

Meanwhile, some armed whaling boats that set out to kill whales from a port in Iceland found themselves harassed, bumped, led off course and in one case scuttled by a series of a quick strikes from a never identified force.

Oddly, a group of mixed species whales was reported as floating nearby; whales seldom traveled in mixed species groups. Still, the strange grouping could only have been coincidental. Official blame was soon placed on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, although several men from the boats involved admitted publicly that never at any time did they see another vessel engaged in an attack.

The Demesne was awakened early that same morning by a buzzing roar. In a space of a few seconds, all the grounds were covered by grasshoppers. Millions. They began decimating every piece of vegetation available.

The Frog Teams responded quickly. For them, grasshoppers were a delicacy, and they scooped them up by the tongue-full. Many other Demesne animals did the same, whether or not grasshoppers were occasional features of their diet.

Yet while the animals found themselves eating bunches of grasshoppers, they soon discovered that most of the grasshoppers disappeared the moment one tried to touch them. Ling Ling communicated between everyone rapidly. She and Leo and Sy quickly realized that while some thousands of grasshoppers had indeed descended on the Demesne, the millions that everyone saw were only holographic projections. The Demesne grounds hadn’t been decimated.

The complaining animals who had arrived on the Demesne the day before had been given a nice grassy or muddy spot to sleep, depending on their preferences. They had been watched closely through the night, in two hour shifts, in case they tried any anti-Demesne espionage.

Through much discussion with the complainers the previous day, Leo had become sure that they were indeed Magic Animals. They had all found themselves isolated from other Magic Animal companionship, often through ruses, and had encountered holographic animals with whom they’d had long, misinformed conversations. The Demesne cause was portrayed as full of illusion, arrogance, and hopelessness. The Commandant’s cause was described as trying to find healthy compromises between Beast and Magic Animal excess.

Leo had talked with the complainers for hours. Indoctrination was difficult to overcome. “The issue speaks to the dangers of isolation in the Magic Animal world,” Leo told the complaining animals, making sure that anyone else nearby in the Demesne heard as well. “Those of you who visited yesterday, barraged by lies and insinuations meant to damage your self-worth and sense of purpose, have been attacked by a Beasts principle called ‘The Big Lie.’

“The concept was first developed by that infamously murderous Beast Adolf Hitler. If you tell a lie long enough, making sure that animals hear no information to the contrary, you can persuade any animal to think what you want.

“This fact brings up a problem which needs more attention: keeping channels of information open to more isolated Magic Animals. We need to listen for news about Magic Animals who have been heard of by other animals but not often seen.”

By late morning at the Demesne, the grasshoppers, holographic or real, had disappeared or formed a fine meal. Many at the Demesne had settled in for a bit of post-feast rest while maintaining necessary patrols. The complaining visitors were allowed to stay or go as they pleased. Some, still confused or alarmed, dashed away as quickly as possible.

The complaining hippo stayed, enthralled that other animals actually thought he was handsome. He asked Leo many questions about the concept of the Big Lie. Sy and others lolled in the grass near them.

Leo was explaining some of the ways in which Beasts denied themselves and others important information when Maximilian hurried up from the spot he had maintained beside the Demesne Lake. “You should see this. Significantly unpleasant.”

Sy and Frank and Matilda followed him to the Demesne Lake. It had turned dark red and smelled of hot blood. Into its cooling waters, many gallons of blood were flowing from somewhere invisible.

The lake was connected to underground caverns and waterways beyond the Demesne wall, Sy reminded everyone. It was likely that the blood had come from them. How that had been managed wasn’t clear.

As the animals stood beside the side of the lake, Beast paper appeared in the sky and fluttered to the ground. Sy picked up one page that landed right in front of him. “The Blood of all the animals who died today fighting stupidly against their ally the Commandant has been returned to you,” he read. “Stop now before many more die.”

Sy looked at his three animal friends. “The cheapest effect yet. I wish Jack were here. I’m sure he could explain why exactly Beasts find this ludicrous stuff intimidating.”

Just then, communication from Ling Ling came into Sy’s mind. “Head down to the Beast Media Room. More information coming in.”

Maximilian stayed behind to keep an eye on further developments in the lake and to assess the likely laborious cleanup. The others hurried underground.

Sy and Frank and Matilda found Lucky in the Beast Media room. Basil and Green Bear waved at them from a small room where the frog and bear were working with complex equipment. “I wouldn’t recommend watching any more than you have to,” Lucky said the moment Sy and the others reached him.

Over the Beast Media screen, a montage of images was spewing an appalling story. The pictures were film after film of animals being shot or poisoned by Beasts.

The murders were graphic, sickening, with Beasts looking up gleefully from mangled animal bodies. Sometimes it was just a single animal being killed; more often it was groups. Elephants were slaughtered, rhinos and hippos, tigers and lion, large animals and small. Streams were contaminated and fish rose dead to the surface of the water. Rabbits were poisoned or gunned down.

After watching a few moments, all the animals averted their eyes. “Unthinkably disgusting,” Sy nearly spit.

Lucky said, “Some of the footage is old and has just been spliced in, I can tell. I hate to say it though. Some of it is new, within the last two or three days.”

Basil came in from the next room and held out his heart to everyone. Its edges appeared to be bleeding. “We’ve been tracking multiple atrocities, real or faked, many probably instigated by the Commandant. The Aquatic Teams have stopped quite a few, but there’s only so much we can do at once.”

“And while all this has been going on,” Sy said, “the Commandant has been distracting us with carnival house Beast games.” He looked at Lucky. “The Sir needs to know, now.”

“I’m alerting him through Ling Ling,” Lucky said.

“Basil?” Sy looked at that gracious, generous frog. “We need everything you and Green Bear have. Do you think you can do it?”

“We have located the essential resources.” Basil’s expression was still haggard from the atrocities he had witnessed, but he smiled his benevolent frog smile. “We’ve located the Commandant too.”

#bunny #rabbit #revolution #empire #satire #animals #animal rights #politics #adventure #theory #fantasy #science fiction #environmentalism #sir sleepy

[rahullkohli]

A LITTLE ON NUTRITION AND HEALTH

ok buckle up kids, because i have a load to share on this subject. in this post there will be no shaming of bodies, diets or knowledge - only of idiots who act like they know shit, but in fact are ignorant fools. i.e. idiots who advice people to go on diets, or otherwise treat their nutrition irresponsibly.

also, this is not a ”how to get skinny”-post. this is merely a post to inform about a topic that so many people is dangerously off on. my own personal goal is to lose weight, because my BMI is too high. if you think that you need to lose weight, consult a doctor who can help you figure out if you actually need to lose weight, or if you maybe have an unhealthy relationship with food and/or your body, and that is the issue you need help with.

disclaimer: i am not a licensed nutritionist or health professional. all of my knowledge comes from: me loving to read, me recovering from eating disorders which have prompted me to research on my own plus talk to professionals, me having worked with a nutritionist for over a year where i got to regular updates and have mealplan created specifically for me. also, my mom being a licensed fitness trainer where she also had courses on nutrition.

so, this post came to be because i saw a long post about people being shamed for eating fruit, because some assholes tried to tell them that “fruit is almost pure sugar and bad for you”, or something to that effect, so i will definitely touch on that as well.

the thing is that nutrition is complex and one of the biggest issues in the way our society sees health and nutrition is that it takes a starting point in “one size fits all”, which it most certainly does not. the details of what diet your body needs is unique to you, and magazines/celebrities/blogs/etc. who tries to tell you otherwise either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are feeding you lies on purpose. usually with the goal of money.

as mentioned above; nutrition is damn complex. one diet does not fit all bodies, because our genetic makeup is different. for example, all my three sisters has been diagnosed with PCOS, and i have not. this means that my body can handle carbs better than theirs, because of cysts on their ovaries that overproduce a hormone that makes it harder for their bodies to break down carbs. (feel free to correct me on this one, because i have not researched this condition in details so i may be off on this. i just know people with this diagnosis usually require a low carb diet, the whys and hows are more iffy to me, but this was how i understood it when it was quickly explained to me.) so it is so unique that even four women who share both mother and father doesn’t even match when it comes to dietary needs. it also changes for every person depending on age, so the diet i need now is most likely not the diet i needed as a teenager, or in ten years, and definitely not after menopause because of the hormonal changes.

every single person needs all three macronutrients in their diet, in order to assure the proper function of their body; carbs, protein and fats - yes, fats! as a general rule, it goes most carbs, medium protein and then a healthy, but not too much, amount of fats. but then there are different examples where one needs more or less of one of these because of for example a diagnosis of PCOS. i am not a doctor, so i won’t try to talk about these, because i don’t have the correct information.

CARBS: so why do we need carbohydrates, and why are those what we (usually) need the most of? carbohydrates are what gives us our energy. carbs gets broken down into glucose before entering the bloodstream (this is why athletes love bananas, they're filled with good stuff that gives a good kick after just spending a ton of energy being overly active). this is where the the fruit and vegetables comes in – sure, fruit and some vegetables contain a lot of sugar, but this is fructose which our bodies can easier break down and use for energy rather converting it to fat depots. the sugar that our bodies have trouble breaking down, is refined (often called white, but it also pertains to brown) sugar. simplistically speaking, the sugar we add to our food ourselves.

now, this doesn't mean that you should just eat uncontrollably of fruit and vegetables. as with any other food, overindulging is too much. in denmark the government department for nutrition has for years campaigned that it is important that we get Six A Day. this means six servings of fruit and vegetables every day. due to the high levels of sugar in fruit, for most adults the reasonable choice is 250 grams of fruit, and 350 grams of vegetables every day. the best choices are high in fiber and proteins. especially green ones like apples, broccoli, spinach, peas and green beans are good. note: you also need carbs from stuff like pasta, rice, potatoes, bread, bulgur, quinoa or other in the same category.

PROTEINS: the proteins are responsible for building and maintaining our muscles. this isn't just for bodybuilders/athletes, this is for every single person out there. you need proteins to be able to move your body. protein is also what builds and maintains our hair, nails and skin. a lot of girls/women are in a protein deficit, especially if they work out, because they are afraid it will make them look masculine. this is severe misinformation. as a cisgendered girl/woman you cannot eat or train your way to the look of a stereotypical cisgendered man, you will need to take steroids for that. if you are a trans woman, i will advice you to speak to a professional about this, as i have no information about this, and considering every trans woman's situation is unique in relation to hormones.

protein is most widely known to come from meat and fish, but this can also be found in some vegetables, nuts, soy, quorn and dairy, which is a very good alternative for vegetarians/vegans.

FATS: there was a time where fat was the number one scare in health media, and it hasn't quite been let go since, which is terrible because fats are so incredibly important for our bodies to work the best they can to keep us healthy. fats are responsible for helping your body absorb vitamins, and help keep your heart and organs healthy. if you don't get enough fat, you risk severe constipation and may need surgery. healthy sources of fats are fish and nuts.

so these are the three nutrient groups that we need in order for our bodies to be at our best, but of course it isn't that simple. it also matters how many calories you get, and how you spread them out throughout the day.

as mentioned above, i have been seeing a nutritionist for over a year, and i have lost 20kg by following a mealplan that was tailored to me specifically from information about my gender, age, height, start weight and general activity level. we found that the reason i wasn't losing weight despite my high activity levels, was that i simply wasn't eating enough – yes, another thing media ignores is that eating too little can cause weight gain – and that i didn't spread my food reasonably out over the day, which caused my bloodsugar to be unbalanced.

i started out with one mealplan with x amount of calories spread out on five meals throughout the day. however, since i plateued in my weightloss i just recently got a new plan with more calories and an extra meal a day. this means that i now have three big meals + three snacks, with never more than 2-3 hours between these to keep my bloodsugar leveled all day.

but aside from this you also need to consider vitamins, fiber, minerals and omega 3s. so yeah, it really is about having a balanced diet, but it's much more than just remembering to not eat too much meat, or too much fruit.

why weightloss diets are bullshit and unhealthy: not only is a weightloss diet a waste of time, because if you eat a certain way for x amount of time, and then lose weight to reach your goal, but then go back to eating as you did before, you will just gain the weight back. if you and your doctor think that you need to lose weight, what you need is a lifestyle change. maintaining a healthy body – regardless of size – is a commitment for life. it sounds overwhelming, but breaking it down it is about creating healthy and stable habits, in the form of varied nutrition spread out over your day.

what my experience also tells me is that it is important to not be too restrictive, since this is setting yourself up for failure. if you promise yourself to not have anything unhealthy like chocolate or soda then there's a bigger chance that once you do have it you will end up overindulging. besides, what kind of life is it if you can't enjoy it? sure, healthy and balanced food can be so good and delicious, but there also needs to be space for having pizza with friends, or cake at a birthday party, or a fancy coffee because you just fucking deserve it. you will not ruin your body if you decide to have ice cream one day, or if you just feel like you can't eat anything at all; just do your best to get back to the healthy habit you have worked hard to create.

the key is to not let it be every day, but if you find the diet that fits you specifically, you shouldn't even be craving these things all the time, because all your needs will be satisfied. if you do find that you crave overindulging at all times, you may need professional help. overeating is a disorder and should be taken just as seriously as undereating – both are rooted in psychological issues, and this can't be processed just by getting a mealplan.

i feel like i have been around most of it by now, but if you have any questions (or you actually know more than me and have constructive criticism) you are more than welcome to message me. i hope this was informative and understandable. english isn't my first language, so i apologize for anything that may not make sense in terms of linguistics.

as a last note i want to stress that i am not a professional, and if you are struggling with body image or your relationship with food, please seek help from someone licensed to handle those kinds of things. never try some fad diet because a magazine or a celebrity said it helped them, because it could damage your body than it could do good.

#robertssheehan #i hope it's cool that i tag you since you mentioned that you were interested #nutrition #mental health #food tw #body image tw #eating disorder tw