this husky is mad because he wants to take a bath but isn’t allowed to
let my poor baby take his bath
If y’all really knew. If y’all really knew what utter drama queens huskies are this wouldn’t surprise you at all.
This is my life.
Literally my husky is the same way. He’s only a few months and he’ll cry to go back outside after being in the house two seconds.
I once ran out of my house in my pajamas at 2 in the fucking morning because I heard a dog screaming like it had been hit by a car. As I’m pelting towards the road barefoot I see an open garage with two people standing there and a husky in the back of a truck. I slowed down and asked them if that noise had been their dog.
Heavily embarrassed they admitted that it was. The reason for the godawful tortured sound the dog had made?
“We took his running harness off.”
And that was the moment I vowed to never own a husky.
I frequently pet sit for a friend’s husky, who is completely normal and unremarkable for her kind with one crucial exception.
She is dumb as soup.
(You didn’t hear that from me: her owner thinks she’s a genius, bless him.)
Anyway, my dog Tribble thinks Arya the husky is one of her very own adopted babies, so she stays with us fairly often. Reasons I have heard this dog dissolve into a screaming, wailing meltdown include:
I followed my buddy up a mildly steep hill and now she’s gone and I can’t figure out how to get down
That one cat won’t be friends with me even though all the others will
I hopped up on the sofa and the hardwood floor next to it is much more confusing than the laminate I have lived on since I was two months old and I don’t know how to get down
I’m mildly bored and my buddy yelled at me when I tried to bite her neck for the zillionth time
I want to play with that potted plant but you said I couldn’t
I’m overcome with joy because you took me on a walk to the hardware store
I want that biscuit but I forgot what sit means and now I’m frustrated
I haven’t seen you in two weeks and I forgot you weren’t dead and I’m overjoyed
You are not petting me enough
You are not petting me at all
I got lost four times in five minutes on the off leash trail and now you won’t let me off again for a while
There’s a brush and I need it
You made eye contact with me and didn’t immediately drop everything to pet me
She’s a very good dog, and she’s a sweet dog who is never offended by anything, but the screaming has singlehandedly ensued I will never, ever, ever own a husky. I like having functioning ears too much.
To be fair, you and your friend may both be right: huskies, like border-collies, are just intelligent enough to develop Exciting Cognitive Neuroses, much like a toddler, which frankly dumber dogs will skip because they don’t actually have quite enough extra cognitive space to think up ways to be utterly fucking ridiculous.
I kind of suspect this is going on here in part because of the dog being so very specifically upset that the one cat won’t be friends, despite all the other cats being friends, and also the overcome-with-joy bits: you’ll notice they’re very similar to what makes toddlers randomly cry for no reason.
Where a bulldog doesn’t care about the difference between laminate and hardwood, a husky is just smart enough to get VERY CONCERNED ABOUT HOW THESE ARE SUBTLY DIFFERENT AND POSSIBLY IT MEANS THAT GETTING DOWN WILL BE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE AAAAAUGH! and get hysterically anxious about it.
“Smarter”, in animals as in humans, does not actually always mean “more sensible.” XD
I was feeling very lonely this evening and now I’m laughing down to my belly so thank you for this post
We’re all grappling with the influence that state-sponsored disinformation campaigns can have on our political conversations—and how wide-spread that interference turned out to be. So please take a moment to read this, think about it, and talk about it.
Last fall, we uncovered 84 Tumblr accounts linked to the Russian government through the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. These accounts were being used as part of a disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 U.S. election. After uncovering the activity, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts. Behind the scenes, we worked with the Department of Justice, and the information we provided helped indict 13 people who worked for the IRA.
Now that the investigations are done, we want to let you know how we’re going to help protect Tumblr in the future and what you can do to help.
Here’s what we know about these accounts
The IRA employs more than 1,000 people who engage in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. Their goal is to sow division and discontent in the countries they target. What makes them so difficult to spot is that they’re not spambots. They’re real people who get trained and paid to spread propaganda.
As far as we can tell, the IRA-linked accounts were only focused on spreading disinformation in the U.S., and they only posted organic content. We didn’t find any indication that they ran ads.
Remember, the IRA and other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns play off our zero-sum politics. They want to drive a wedge between us so that we spend our time fighting with each other instead of building towards the future. We’ll be watching for signs of future activity, but the best defense is knowing how they operate and how to judge the content you see.
What we’re doing in response to the interference
First, we’ll be emailing anyone who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed an IRA-linked account with the list of usernames they engaged with.
Second, we’re going to start keeping a public record of usernames we’ve linked to IRA or other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. We’re committed to transparency and want you to know everything that we know.
We’ve decided to leave up any reblog chains that might be on your Tumblrs—you can choose to leave them or delete them. We’re letting you decide because the reblog chains contain posts created by real Tumblr users, often challenging or debunking the false and incideniary claims in the IRA-linked original post. Removing those authentic posts without your consent would encroach on your free speech—and there have been enough disruptions to our conversations as it is.
What we’re doing to stop future disinformation campaigns
You’ve probably read that U.S. intelligence officials expect foreign agents to try similar propaganda campaigns in the future. We’ll be monitoring Tumblr for signs of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, and if we see anything we will…
Terminate the accounts and remove their original posts.
Notify you if we determine that you’ve liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed a propaganda account.
There are also things you can do to help stop the spread of disinformation and propaganda.
Be aware that people want to manipulate the conversation. Knowing that disinformation and propaganda accounts are out there makes it harder for them to operate. The News Literacy Project has this handy checklist for spotting their tricks.
Be skeptical of things you read. Disinformation campaigns work because they know people don’t fact check. Look for reliable sources, and double-check that the source really says the same thing as the post. You can also check Snopes and Politifact. Both are award-winning resources and usually have the latest viral claim fact checked on the front page.
Correct the record. When you see people spreading misinformation—even unintentionally—politely say something in a reblog or reply. If it’s your friend, send them a message to let them know.
One last note: Please vote.
Transparency won’t mean a thing if we don’t participate in the process. Whatever your political stance, voting ensures a government that represents your interests. For our U.S. users: You can register online or by mail, and many states are holding primaries right now.
I was born and still currently live in Eastern Europe. Russia and its manipulation of and outright involvement in the politics of the region’s countries has been the background radiation of my life, from the subtle (social manipulation campaigns, as what we’re seeing now) to the predictable (cutting off natural gas supplies to and cutting off imports from neighboring countries who don’t toe the line they’re given) to the utterly blatant (the invasion of Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine, setting up multiple puppet-states in the region that only exist due to the financial and military propping-up by the Kremlin, assassinations and attempted assassinations of whistleblowers and political opponents of the regime in power). Spoiler alert: for Eastern Europe, the Cold War never truly ended, we had to keep dealing with life under the Kremlin’s shadow and its manipulations and belief that we are its traditional sphere of influence, regardless of our own opinions on the matter, same as before the fall of the USSR. For small countries bordering Russia, national sovereignty was, is and will continue to be nothing but a joke.
Seeing Westerners vehemently deny Russia’s skill in disseminating propaganda and infiltrating organizations and social groups is absolutely astounding to me and leaves me with only two conclusions – either I’m dealing with incredibly, headache-inducingly naive people… or with individuals who know all of the above and they just don’t give a shit, because they’ve decided that their hatred for Western liberal and progressive values runs deep enough in order to view autocrats as ‘natural allies.’
Here’s the e-mail I received, which shows the extent of infiltration within Western progressive communities:
figuring out you’re asexual is like trying to find a nonexistent needle in a very large haystack except people keep trying to convince you that you’re just not looking hard enough or you’ll find the right needle eventually but the needle just isn’t there and yet everyone else’s is and then you wonder whether or not you actually have a needle and then you spot something that might be a needle but nope it’s just another hay strand and everything is confusing and now the haystack is on fire
And you’ve actually never seen a needle so every time they describe theirs, you just assume they are talking about a sharp hay strand until they say something that sounds different and you’re left thinking if they are actually making that up because they’ve heard that same description from somebody else or if they really do have another thing and in that case that would mean… you don’t have a needle?
disabled adults who are still living at home with their parents because they’re unable to live on their own—whether it’s temporary or permanent, whether they’re working or not working—don’t deserve to be looked down on or made to feel like they’re not doing enough or aren’t good enough. what they deserve is support, love, understanding, and respect. 💜💛
I’m starting to appreciate more just how scary it is to be a doctor.
You have a patient come in with a stomach ache, nausea, feels tired and sort of generally miserable, no other obvious characteristic symptoms.
Out of 100 patients like this, 90* will be a minor gastroenteritis or whatever, maybe you ate something bad, here’s some nausea medication, go home and eat bland foods and get enough fluid and sleep it off.
And 7 will be appendicitis or gallstones or pancreatitis and need to be admitted to the hospital, 1 will be a heart attack with atypical symptoms, 1 will be the first sign of cancer, and 1 will be some weirdo disorder with a name like “Coleman’s 4268py deletion snydrome, Type II”** that you never heard of.
If I were a doctor, this would make me terrified to ever tell a patient “maybe you ate something bad, go home and sleep it off.” Even though that’s usually the right answer, and even though it’s a waste of time and money to do an EKG and CT and 4268py test on everyone with a tummy ache–it’s got to be anxiety-provoking to not be certain that you aren’t missing something. And at some point you will send someone home only to get a call the next day that they collapsed and now they’re in the ICU (or the morgue). And it’s got to be really hard to go back to work after that and say “go home and sleep it off” to your next patient, even though that’s still usually the right answer.
I’m understanding more these days how tough it is to live with that kind of risk and responsibility.
*not actual statistics
**not an actual thing
there has to be a better way for them to deal with it than not giving a shit about their patients, which is the approach most who deal with me appear to have taken.
are you saying there isn’t enough training or support or something? actually im saying the latter, come to think of it. if it’s really this stressful for doctors, they need more help coping with that so they can stop ruining our lives.
Yeah something I notice that is infuriating is often patients are expected to preform emotional labor for caretakers. Like it doesn’t matter if it is a doctor or one of the many “kid is killed for being a burdern by overstressed parent” stories, the common trend is that the one most viewed as the “victim” in the circumstances is the care provider not the one relying on the care.
Full offense, if you cannot handle the emotional labor of those things, that is in fact one of the BEST uses of therapy. Meanwhile I am stuck in therapy instead, for ptsd, when I am still in the traumatic enviorment because I have to take on the emotional burden of being told that my existance is harming people. My life is so bad it gives my therapist depression sure wish the doctors went instead of coping by telling themselves they are saving me from myself by leaving me to deteriorate.
You are responsible for your own health. You cannot be telling patients they need to learn more coping skills while saying “it is fine I cannot avoid taking my stress out on other people because my reasons are valid”. Then why the fuck is “doctors refused to even run tests until I was bedridden and now my entire life is ruined” not a valid reason?
I am pretty sure the reason this happens is because doctors want to pretend that “only broken people” with actual dxs need to go to therapy. The ironic thing about problems like this is that if you have the dx already that means you probably already are using coping skills but a person who thinks “I am fine and normal” is not going to examine their behavior at all. Instead everyone acts like it is more efficent to give all the emotional labor to the person who is already sick because they can “handle” it better without considering that the reason for this is that person has already applied every coping skill to their life that they could find but it is nowhere near enough when you are carrying the burdens for everyone around you as well.
My dad has very advanced Parkinson’s. He was going to a general neurologist for years named Dr. “H”. Dr. H would up my dad’s meds and never look deeper than the Parkinson’s for what is causing his discomfort. My dad had a maddening sensation in his right leg that wasn’t pain or itch, but it seemed to be coming from his sciatic nerve. The Levodopa meds relieved it somewhat for short periods, but as my dad’s dosages had to be increased to keep up with the symptoms, his window of being rid of that sensation shrank until it disappeared.
My dad eventually got DBS surgery in 2013 (electrodes in the brain to control tremors). He hoped it would make that leg sensation stop. Nope. The guy from Medtronic who adjusted dad’s battery packs turned the charge up to levels that helped dad’s tremors, but didn’t touch the weird sensations and caused side effects like face pulling (lips sagged down) and more stiffness. We had to dial it back and accept the tremor control. Btw it didn’t stop them in his legs, it just made them weaker. His hands have 100% tremor control.
My dad fell into depression. It’s kinda common in Parkinson’s because the reward hormone of dopamine gets depleted. He barely ate. He was losing tons of weight. He developed severe pain in his hands and wrists that we thought was carpal tunnel syndrome at first. We got wrist braces that didn’t help. The possibility of surgery on his hands to release the nerves was becoming a possibility. Then he lost the “surface” feeling in all of his fingertips and most of his feet. At least the terrible pain in his wrists stopped…
Dr. H’s eyes always glazed over when my dad listed off the litany of symptoms and discomforts he had. There were lots. Some were the same ones he had all the time and some were always new. After a lot of back and forth with adjusting the DBS, Dr. H finally said “Well, it’s Parkinson’s! You get worse and then you die,” in the most careless, joking tone I ever heard from a person. My sister had to grab my shirt because I was winding up to punch that man in the mouth. My parents both saw the rage in me. I had to throw both hands over my mouth to hold back the flurry of “you fucking piece of ass piss shit, how dare you dismiss my dad that way. I’ll kick your fucking ass!” level cuss words trying to burst out of me. I’m not someone who likes to get violent or call people names, though it can happen IRL in moments of sheer rage like that!
My very desperate family talked to Dr DB (first / last initial to avoid confusion), the surgeon who did the DBS surgery for dad. He’s a real cool-headed guy and the day he did dad’s surgery, I shook his hand and could feel how steady and sure his grasp was. I asked him to say a prayer while scrubbing in and he later told me he did. (Totally cool guy!) We told him we were desperate to get dad help, and he recommended Dr. B, a personal friend of his who was a lady neurologist with a specialty in Parkinson’s.
We went to Dr. B and OMG she was horrified at the state my dad was in and asked for his complete Parkinson’s and medical history. She did all kinds of tests, LISTENED to him and made changes.
My dad ended up diagnosed with neuropathy alongside his Parkinson’s. (Or maybe it’s part of it, can’t remember.) The discomfort in his leg and pain in his wrists could’ve been solved with one new medication, but he suffered with it for YEARS because Dr. H blamed everything on the Parkinson’s instead of looking deeper.
She put dad on Horizent, a neuropathy medication with a mild antidepressent. Within a few days my dad lost that weird sensation in his leg and started eating normally again. He still continued to lose weight for reasons we don’t know. Dr. B sent him to a ton of specialists to test for things like cancer and Addison’s disease, both of which were negative. She wanted to rule out the worst possibilities first. During all this, she recommended he drink a nutritional shake right before bed because she suspected the Parkinson’s tremors were burning up all his calories, so absorbing calories during sleep when his tremors went away would bring his weight back up. We got him those and he put his old weight back on so well that we had to stop because he was getting overweight. His weight has been healthy for him since. We suspect it was partly depression being helped by the Horizent, because a few months on the Horizent had his personality back to what it was, too.
My dad’s sleep issues went unaddressed for years, but now he’s on sleeping meds that let him at least get a few hours of sleep a night instead of no sleep at all for days at a time. Sleep issues are also a Parkinson’s thing. Try going to sleep when your legs won’t stop shaking and you can’t get comfortable…yeah. He’s on meds that basically knock him out, and even then he only gets maybe 4 hours of sleep because he’s up as soon as it wears off. But 4 hours per night is better than 4 hours per week. He falls asleep during the day a lot, too, usually for 20 minutes at a time.
We’re currently working out why he has pain in his neck and head. We suspect one of his DBS wires might be pinching a nerve. But Dr. B is on top of the issue because she listens to my dad instead of staring at him, writing a prescription and sending him on his way.
My dad’s life is far from comfortable right now, but things are being managed and looked at because Dr. B really listens to him, asks him questions, asks him to clarify if he describes something in an unclear way (happens a lot lol) and she gives an air of genuinely caring about my dad’s discomfort. He’ll tell her he’s scared and she’ll rub his arm and tell him she understands and that she’s doing everything she can to take care of him.
So this leaves me wondering if the doctors who act so cold and uncaring are either close to retiring, burnt out or struggling with compassion fatigue. Still, any doctor who doesn’t look deeper than a patient’s prevalent condition / illness feels plain lazy to me. At least doctors who question themselves show they still have compassion. I never got that feeling from Dr. H.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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