Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.
In a surprising twist, scientists have discovered that octopuses,
along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA
(ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.
This is weird because that’s really not how adaptations usually
happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some
fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation – a change
to the DNA.
Really interesting short read for those interested in evolution.
stupid non-cephalopodes: evolve through a relatively stable updating of genetic matrices
grand cephalopod savants: biohacking into the nature mainframe and leaving eldritch comments in the engine’s source. what the fuck is a “stable release”
If someone told you that the breakout meme star of the summer of 2017 was going to be a woman in a man-on-man gay porn, you definitely would not believe them. And yet, here we are.
If you’ve been on any kind of social media in the past few days, you’ve almost certainly seen what we’re talking about: a woman, looking incredulous, taking personal offense to any number of things — transphobia, the happiness of others, capitalism itself — with six simple words: “Right in front of my salad?”
We spoke with the woman who started it all. She’s a model and actress who goes by the name Nikki V. — though lately, her fans have taken to calling her “queen of salad” — and she gave us the details on the meme’s NSFW origins. Read more (8/7/17)
Neoliberalism, as I and others talk about it, is a broad ideology that really started becoming popular in political, economic, and governmental circles in the 1970’s and reached its peak in global popularity in the 1980’s. It describes the political paradigm we are in right now, the political conditions of modern society. As the name suggests, it calls for a revitalization of the classical liberal view of economic policy. Concretely, this means free trade, low taxes, deregulation, privatization, and balanced budgets.
This post is going to shortly explain the neoliberal story as it took place in America. I only mention the experiences in other nations at the end for brevity, relevance to my followers and I, and because I don’t understand them as well as I understand America’s.
Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction to the Keynesian welfare state politics that had become popular in the West. In the 1970’s, the American economy was experiencing a phenomenon called “stagflation”- simultaneous stagnation and inflation- that the old-school Keynesians who had been the dominant group in American economics had believed to be impossible for any extended period of time. In the intellectual gap their failure left, economists like Milton Friedman made the case not only for a different approach to monetary policy in order to solve stagflation, but also for the idea that many forms of governmental involvement in the economy being harmful. Others, like James Buchanan, made the case to the economics profession that government bureaucrats acted in selfish self-interest, not the public interest, and thus that policy prescriptions should be much more cautious in calling for governmental solutions to economic issues.
At the same time, businesses began to be more aggressive in asserting their interests in politics. This development was prompted in part by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. writing a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 arguing that “the American economic system is under attack” from progressive critics of big business, and that the business community should fight back. A number of conservative and libertarian think tanks and advocacy organizations were created and expanded in order to make the intellectual case for “freer” capitalism, including the Heritage Foundation (1973), the Cato Institute (1974), and the American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1938 but became influential during the 1970′s).
Take all of these trends, throw in increased public skepticism of government after Vietnam and Watergate, and you have a recipe for fundamental political change.
Between the economic disarray, the public distrust, and both intellectual and financial support for an alternative to post-war welfare statism, a new ideology became dominant in the political sphere. This ideology was encapsulated by Ronald Reagan, who summed it up perfectly with his famous quote: “in this current crisis, government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.”
That’s is standard conservative fare today, but we forget how radical both that message and Reagan himself were at the time. I’ve noted before that, even at the time of his election, Reagan was seen by some as too far right to win. The last (elected) Republican president before him, Nixon, created the EPA, the EITC, OSHA, and a number of other progressive programs. He also called for healthcare reform even stronger than Obamacare, and an expansion of welfare. Nixon’s domestic agenda was in many ways a left-wing one, so much so that one journalist at the time noted that he left the Democrats having to resort to “metooism.”
But Nixon was simply responding to political pressures from the left, the same pressures that had forced LBJ’s hand with civil rights legislation and the war on poverty. In the late 1970’s, those pressures began to be outweighed by increasing pressure from businesses in the direction of neoliberalism. This started under Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the cautious deregulation of airlines and the trucking industry. However, it was Reagan who truly delivered the neoliberal agenda in America and institutionalized it into government.
The Reagan era also saw the start of the growth in importance of campaign donations. Republicans had not only a strong base of think tanks to provide them with a network of intellectual support, they also had far more donations from the corporate interests they were serving. Congressional Republicans beat their Democratic counterparts in campaign expenditures in every campaign from 1976-1992.
Traditionally, Democrats had relied on unions as a critical source of both campaign donations and organizational support. With union strength declining (thanks, in part, to attacks by the Reagan administration,) the Democrats were being totally outgunned. Recognizing that the game has changed, a number of Democrats (including one Bill Clinton) joined together in the Democratic Leadership Council with the stated goal of dragging the Democratic Party to the right and boosting campaign contributions. They succeeded. When Clinton eventually won the presidency, he cemented neoliberalism as the law of the land by making it clear that the Democrats would not challenge the fundamental new doctrine of limited government involvement in many parts of the economy, and as a result made the Democrats competitive again. (Read Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s “Winner-Take-All Politics” and Thomas Ferguson and Joel Roger’s “Right Turn” for more on this issue).
Instead of challenging the entirety of Reagan’s assertion of government as problem, Clinton espoused a “third way” ideology: in his second inauguration, Clinton said that “Government is not the problem, and Government is not the solution. We—the American people—we are the solution.” Clinton made concessions to left-liberal voters with things like small tax hikes on the wealthy, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Family Medical Leave Act, he continued the neoliberal march of rolling back progressive achievements through the deregulation of Wall Street, conservative reform of welfare, NAFTA, and gutting public housing.
Clinton himself was aware of the way that American politics was moving to the right, and he was sometimes frustrated with it. Allegedly, he once entered a meeting in the Oval Office complaining:
Where are all the Democrats? I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans. We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?
But he didn’t really do anything to slow the process. Most of the Democratic Party accepts their role doing nothing more than, to paraphrase Gar Alperovitz (can’t find the quote right now), humanizing their opponents’ conservative projects. They’re there to make things a bit better for the little guy here and there, but never to fundamentally shake up the political-economic system in any way. This is why people will refer to many Democrats as neoliberals even when they don’t literally advocate for a “free market.”
As a result, the Republicans continued to push further right under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. The Democrats started to dig their heels in and push back a little for the first time during the later part of the George W. Bush administration as his (and the wars’) approval ratings sank, and they now seem to have stabilized more or less. An increasingly loud progressive wing of the party continues to push for the type of reforms that would have been center-left in the 1960’s, but the party establishment is now fine just holding on to ideological territory to the right of where it was several decades ago.
With the establishment of both parties accepting neoliberal ideology, it achieved status as what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony”: because the most powerful class of America accepted it as fact, it was instilled into the American consciousness as “common sense” that can’t be seriously challenged. Ex.) “You want to raise taxes to pay for universal healthcare? That’s ridiculous, everyone knows taxes need to be cut, even the Democrats want tax cuts for the middle class!,” “Everyone agrees there’s too much regulation today,” etc.
But things are changing. What we’re seeing now in this election is the collapse of neoliberalism’s hegemony. Republican elites took neoliberalism being their root organizing principle for granted while running campaigns utilizing dog whistle racism (that’s a whole post in itself), never realizing that they were attracting a base of voters who hated immigrants a lot more than regulation. The Republicans have drifted so far to the right that unabashed nationalists like Trump can now take the lead of the party, even though he’s running on racist xenophobia and protectionism that are in conflict with neoliberal ideals. The Tea Party was the first hiccup, and Trump is the new one. The GOP’s electoral strategy is coming back to haunt them.
Even during their neoliberalization, the Democrats always had a left-wing occupied by social democrats who wanted to continue the progress that was abandoned in the late 70’s. They were empowered by both opposition to the Iraq War late in the Bush era and the subsequent economic crash that occurred as a result of neoliberal deregulation of the finance sector. Obama ran as a semi-progressive but governed as a standard Democrat who wanted no fundamental changes (Obamacare instead of single-payer, Dodd-Frank instead of reshaping the finance system, etc.), leaving progressive disappointment and frustration to rise to the surface again once a primary was held to determine who would be the Democratic candidate after Obama. Thus, the Bernie phenomenon. [Side note: the neoliberal period has seen shrinking amounts of state funding for public colleges, requiring higher tuition to pay for them. This has angered those who are about to enter, those who are currently in, and those who have recently left college, and, in my opinion, further bolstered support for Bernie among youth.]
I think that the collapse of neoliberalism is embedded in the formula of neoliberalism itself, very similar to Marxist views about how capitalism creates its own life-threatening crises. Neoliberal globalization results in devastating deindustrialization in blue collar parts of America, leaving a class of people unemployed and feeling totally forgotten by their government, especially since government aid to the poor is often seen as shameful in a hyperindividualist neoliberal environment. This prompts an inevitable political reaction. The center-left (ex. Clinton) and center-right (ex. Jet Bush) sing the praises of neoliberal globalization, the left (ex. Sanders) vigorously attacks the “neoliberal” part, and the far-right vigorously attacks the “globalization” part (ex. Trump). If you can’t tell, my position on the left leaves me disliking neoliberalism and believing that the far-right’s disdain for all forms of globalization is a distraction and misidentification of the root issue, using foreigners and people of color as scapegoats.
A number of other industrialized countries have underwent neoliberalization on roughly the same time frame and are now experiencing similar backlashes: The U.K., neoliberalized under Thatcher, now has UKIP, Jeremy Corbyn, social democratic Scottish nationalists. France has the National Front. Germany has the AfD and Pegida. New Zealand has New Zealand First. Sweden has the Sweden Democrats. Spain has Podemos. Neoliberalism was pushed on much of Latin America through the “Washington Consensus” doctrine of the U.S. international finance organizations like the IMF, leading to a revitalization of Latin American left-populism in many countries.
There are exceptions of course: Australia, weirdly enough, doesn’t have as much far-right or far-left activity as the other nations, as far as I’m aware. Mexican politics don’t have very strong far-right and far-left politics either right now, though the Zapatista movement was undoubtably the type of response I’m talking about. Russian politics are odd enough that it’s kinda hard to determine whether what’s going on their is the result of their neoliberal shock therapy after the fall of the USSR or not.
Regardless, the only countries where neoliberalism has had serious economic success are nations with authoritarian political systems that can suppress dissent: neoliberalism was forced upon the people of Chile under the brutal rule of Pinochet, and China underwent large scale economic liberalization under the brutal rule of Deng. For all of the other problems that may have occurred, both resulted in astonishing economic growth. Regardless, these experiences seem to directly conflict with the classical liberal argument of a strong correlation between a laissez-faire economy and political democracy, at least at all points on the curve.
This post is already way too long, and I’ve probably tried to cover too much, but the concept of neoliberalism is so important to understanding our modern world that I feel like all of this is important to cover.
how was the tea party a hiccup in republican adherence to neoliberalism? the tea parties ideology was extremely neoliberal.
otherwise tho, this seems fairly accurate.
how many ppl were in the tea party because of ideology tho?
hard to say, but the tea party was wealthier on average than republicans as a whole, so i think it’s plausible that a substantial chunk of them were genuinely invested in the tea party talking points of slashing social programs and lowering taxes (both of which are part of the neoliberal agenda)
I really wish I had it with me at the moment, but Matt A. Baretto and Christopher S. Parker’s “Change They Don’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” makes a very strong quantitative case for the Tea Party movement being a reactionary conservative one, not a neoliberal conservative one. It did certainly have the financial support of extremely neoliberal backers, though.
this is long, but it’s a fantastic explanation of how corporations (and politicians kidding their asses) fucked over not only the political system in the u.s., but a lot of the rest of the world.
people are sooo against eating disorders until they take away the names and switch it to “dieting” or “health tips”
like ohh you don’t support eating disorders and think they’re terribly tragic? then why are you constantly talking about how you eat too much? why do you separate foods into categories like “guilty pleasures” and “guilt free treats”? why do you insist that the ultimate healthy diet is eating less and working out more? why do you think you have to work out a lot more if you ate something “"bad”“
why are eating disorders only bad if we’re being hospitalized, but if we’re drastically losing weight and dont have a diagnosis we’re “doing great”
why did i have to hear more and more compliments about my weight loss than people concerned because i was getting weaker and becoming even more tired than usual? why did people make me want to go back to starving myself because i want the compliments that they gave me when i was rapidly losing weight?
eating disorders are only seen in a bad light when people are either dead or dying, but if we’re just getting skinnier it doesn’t matter how we lost the weight- we’re seen as a success story because we turned out thin and thats what really matters right? being thin? thats the only goddamn important thing in this world
It’s an obsession with eating only “the right foods” or a perception of “healthy, pure foods” and having “cleanse” days and “detoxing” when you slip up and eat either the wrong food or too much of something. Now, tell me that doesn’t sound like something you might read under Cosmo’s “top ten tips to lose belly fat for summer”, or hell, literally any health vlogger on youtube with thousands of subscribers claiming they cured their depression/cancer by doing the banana cleanse, which yes, is actually a real thing. Don’t do it. Please. Love yourselves.
A UK based study (can’t find it right now but I will add it in if I can) on eating disorders noted that those most likely to suffer from the symptoms of orthorexia are people who think they are “just dieting” or trying to be really healthy by following popular “pure” food movements like veganism and paleo, but to unhealthy extremes. Usually because they’ve been suckered in by popular food vloggers who argue violently against the validity of the term, or the notion you can ever eat “too healthily”, despite the term being coined by Dr Steven Bratman back in 1996, a physician well known for being an advocate for safe, alternative medicines and therapies for better health—so not just a “western physician” ragging on “pure alternatives” like a lot of these diet frauds claim.
Eating healthily is not about deprivation. The human body needs fat, it needs carbohydrates, it needs salt, and a whole host of other things people will try to convince you you need to eat 0 of, in order to be healthy.
Most of you know I got super sick at the start of the year from an horrendous virus that meant I couldn’t eat solids for almost six weeks, I lost a lot of weight very quickly, over 20lbs. And while I’ve managed to gain some of that back as I’ve gradually been able to increase my food intake (I am now up to roughly 1200 calories a day which is still too low for my size and age, but much better than the 200 I was living on for over a month) I’m still suffering the side effects of being forced to eat nothing but organic oatmeal and bone broth for all those weeks, including but not limited to hair loss, broken nails, skin that looks like absolute shit, and not to even mention the mental and physical fatigue I’m still suffering from over six months later.
And don’t get me wrong, I was eating healthy foods, I was enduring the “detox” dream so many magazines and health vloggers rave about. But the truth of it is, healthy humans aren’t made to live on those things alone, (and that’s not actually how the body detoxes itself, but that’s another rant for another time)—regardless of how healthy those things are.
You need to eat.
You are allowed to eat.
Fuck these disordered ideas of societal norms. You can be healthy and happy and worthy, without being thin.
And you ARE WORTHY, no matter what.
I also have to add that orthorexic/other disordered eating behavior is positively encouraged among people dealing with certain medical conditions. Very much including by health professionals.
All of this can be very dangerous even for people who have no existing ED history, never mind those of us who do.
hey, so trump has been championing the RAISE act, a bill which would create a new evaluation to determine whether or not foreign-born people qualify to apply for citizenship in the u.s.
to be clear, not citizenship itself, but the mere ability to apply for it
it’s a point system. you need at least 30 points. you can take a simplified version of the test here!
spoiler alert: having family here, even family born here, does not net you a single point.
under the RAISE act, if your english skills are judged to be “poor,” you’re over 51, you have a job offer in the u.s. with a salary of less than $77900, and you plan on investing under $1.35 million worth of foreign currency here, the only way to even qualify for applying for citizenship is to have won “a nobel prize or major international award”
(also i’m assuming this hypothetical person holds at least a bachelor’s degree. if they don’t, they could literally have won a nobel prize and NOT qualify)
(also, it weighs money so highly that if your u.s. job offer has a salary of $155,800 or higher and you’ve got the equivalent of $1.8 million to burn…those two facts together count exactly equal to having won a nobel prize.)
the article notes that the RAISE act is unlikely to pass, but yeah, if you see pundits debating it on the news or if people you know express support, that’s what it is.
also, the act was created by republican senators david perdue (ga) and tom cotton (ar), so on the off chance you live in georgia or arkansas, maybe give them a call!
who has that one video of someone playing some survival game and some player runs by blasting death grips while being chased by animals and it just fades into the distance
That’s an old version of Rust, if anyone is wondering
if you’ve been trained to to dislike yourself for enjoying anything due to years of being told you’re annoying clap your hands 👏👏👏
if I listed out every particular instance that was met with negativity enough for me to stop feeling comfortable talking about it, this comic would be like 50 panels.
Okay so this is so important. Please don’t ignore this post if you think it doesn’t apply to you, because even if it doesn’t, it could be happening to someone you care about. And it may seem like nothing, it feels like it’s nothing for a while but after hearing people say just how boring or dumb something you love is… well, you start to believe it. Before you realise it you find yourself not finishing stories or sentences because there’s a voice in your head saying “shut up, no one cares” and just like that those things you used to love so much lose their spark. They no longer make you as happy as before, everything is tainted and you hate yourself for not fitting in, for not being as interesting as everyone else. Because if everyone says you aren’t then they must be right? But no! It’s not true and you tell yourself that everytime, but it’s not enough. You have to learn to love the things you used to love again.
In my case, I’ve missed out on so many experiences because of this. I had given up trying to make people see the things I like aren’t a waste of time. But I’m slowly trying to claim them back.
So please, if someone you know ever tells you something about them or about what they like please listen to them. Even if you don’t really enjoy the thing they are telling you about, if they matter to you please listen. That simple action could mean the whole world to them.
this is kinda painful tbh
Also, speaking as an autistic dude rebloggin from another autistic dude, this treatment/feeling is so much a part of the autistic experience it ain’t even funny.
Which does say something about inbaked societal ableism that I can’t quite articulate…
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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