Shout out to my Arabic teacher that looked at us yesterday mid-lesson and said, “I’m worried. You all look exhausted and depressed.”
Of we were all like, “Oh yeah we’re dead inside, you haven’t noticed?”
And he snapped shut the textbook, threw up his hands and said, “That’s not healthy! No more vocab! Time for dancing!”
And he taught us a dance from Iraq and we danced instead of doing vocab. We didn’t stop dancing until he saw all of us laughing and was satisfied that we were all feeling better. It was perhaps the coolest, most kind-hearted thing I’ve ever seen a college instructor do.
Your abuser’s trauma does not justifiy them abusing you. Your abuser’s disability does not justify them abusing you. Your abuser’s gender does not justify them abusing you. Your abuser’s illness does not justify them abusing you.
For everyone that needs to hear this: there is nothing you could ever do that’s punishable by abuse, and there is NOTHING anyone could ever say to justify the abuse you experience(d).
The “tragedy of the commons” is the proposition that it’s not feasible for there to be common resources that anyone can access freely, because everyone will overuse it and no one will take the responsibility upon themselves to cut back their use and prevent the ruining of the resource, and even if people agree on the necessity to use it moderately, the temptation to cheat will be overwhelming, because everyone will think: “As long as everyone else follows the rules, I can cheat and it’s no big deal.”
The solution, so the author claims, was either to implement a coercive system of punishing overusers, like a government, or to divide up the commons into small plots that each individual is responsible for, and so will suffer the consequences solely if they overuse, a system like private property.
Seems like it only applies once the population gets above a certain size and social institutions that constrain individual behaviour are sufficiently weak.
Because this is the thing that apparently makes me Be This Way, I will point out once again that there was a real historical tragedy of the commons, which is that the extensive common land which had been owned and farmed collectively by the British peasantry for hundreds of years – with, I will point out, precisely none of the problems allegedly inherent to such a system according to the author of the original paper – was forcibly appropriated during the Agricultural Revolution in a series of Acts of Parliament. A parliament, I will underline, consisting of and elected by the landowning class, as in you literally had to own land to vote.
This caused a massive rural poverty crisis because people no longer had the basic right to live on and farm the land. It then caused a massive urban poverty crisis because people moved to cities in search of employment.
This is the tragedy – not that people’s inherent selfishness precludes any sort of peaceful social organisation around common resources, but that any society that gives disproportionate power to people who are already resource-rich is likely to end up screwing over those who are poor and voiceless.
So the real tragedy of the commons is that people will steal your shit and then write high-minded academic treatises about how that’s in your best interests.
(Another reminder that “externalities” and “pollution” is a better example of the originally intended problem, anyway).
You can’t get much happier than a pig in muck, or so we are told.
But when this little piggy arrived in the farmyard she showed a marked reluctance to get her trotters dirty. While her six brothers and sisters messed around in the mire, she stayed on the edge shaking. It is thought she might have mysophobia – a fear of dirt.
Owners Debbie and Andrew Keeble were at a loss, until they remembered the four miniature wellies used as pen and pencil holders in their office. They slipped them on the piglet’s feet – and into the mud she happily ploughed. [x]
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.
Wow. This really hit me hard.
EAT
Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.
One of the BEST WAYS I fight my anorexia is wising up with scientific facts, and letting go of my twisted logic!!!
When you feel like restricting, remember that diet culture MADE you think restriction=weightloss=skinny=Good.
Gina Kolata’s book Rethinking Thin has a lot of fact and is very readable, for those wanting a jumping-off point.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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