Tag: but yeah

optimistic-red-velvet-walrus:

syngoniums:

verylargefrogs:

plaid-flannel:

Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine.
Photo: Bill Roorbach

Hmm. How about erase the colonial view that the Americas were simply available, undeveloped, uncultivated lands before the arrival of white settlers. Indigenous people live(d) on that land, engineered it, and had highly complex interactions with it. Large-scale environmental destabilization, deforestation, and pollution as we know to did not begin until the period of settler colonialism. Capitalist exploitation continues to destroy the land and the indigenous peoples on that land. Maine, for example, did have set territories of indigenous communities (Miqmaq, penobscot, etc.). Modern borders of settler nation-states do not correspond to these original territorial bounds.

What I’m saying is that people need to stop thinking that human occupation is responsible for the disastrous environmental situation we have today. There are specific cultural views of land, land use, and production that cause it. These views are not universal to human societies. Indigenous communities are more than capable of occupying land without laying waste to it, and did so for thousands of years.

All of the above, plus wtf @ the bizarre implication that a huge chunk of North America was homogenous New England-style forest, and not a tremendous diversity of vegetation well suited to their respective climates! Loving nature is not a replacement for thinking critically about how colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism have shaped how you conceive of wilderness, humanity, and the relationships between them!

throwing some stuff out:

  • european colonial settlers marveled out how the trees were conveniently wide apart enough for humans to travel through easily and all the fruits conveniently grew along these ‘natural’ paths.
  • at the same time, they wrote journals about how when approaching the american east coast, the skies above the forests were often black with smoke, without connecting the controlled wildfires to how humanly convenient the forests were
  • the amazon is as human-made as it is ‘natural’. we have evidence of its cultivation, with indigenous folk building islands of rich soil to stand over flooding waters, like the chinampas of aztec agriculture. we no longer have the knowledge to recreate terra preta, which is the uniquely rich soil created by indigenous agriculture that makes cultivation possible in the amazon
  • maize and potato, two crops that basically saved europe from starvation, are the result of long artificial selection by central and south americans
  • the idea that indigenous peoples did not cultivate the land or act upon it was a way of removing their agency and history and justifying the seizure of their land from them. adam smith wrote that the americans were hunters with no agriculture because the small maize plots they grew did not count (???) vs the advanced economy of britain

tabularojo:

daveyjames:

I’m sorry but I won’t be able to take Ready Player One seriously. We’re supposed to believe a worldwide online forum where you can be anyone and anything would look like this

when in real life the concept has turned out far more like

VR Chat has honestly destroyed Ready Player One

flowisaconstruct:

pettygraham:

queeranarchism:

zvaigzdelasas:

violaslayvis:

I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people

also the american eugenics movement which started in the late 1800′s was a huge inspiration for Hitler, and was even where the idea of blonde hair blue eyed superiority came from, and the idea of a “gas chamber” to take care of “undesirables”. In the early part of the third reich, the american eugenics movement saw it as the logical conclusion of their ““research”” and republished lots and lots of nazi propaganda 

but yeah, nazism is so un-american uwu 

Hitler praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf. When the nazis wrote the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, they specifically modelled them after the Jim Crow Laws,

the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.  

Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust. 

Welp

At bare minimum, America was founded on two massive crimes against humanity: native genocide and slavery. To pretend that it’s some pristine shining beacon of freedom actually weakens us as a country, because we don’t deal with the demons of our past, which makes us vulnerable to continued injustice.

For people to cast realism as “hating America” is disgusting. We’re a flawed nation built on a good principle that we applied unevenly. Admitting that and trying to do better is strength, not weakness.

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

butch women and other gnc women deserve so much respect and care. women who choose to defy long-standing rules about how women can look and act face so much risk just to be themselves, and deserve feminist solidarity.

traditional femininity is devalued because of misogyny but it’s also enforced compulsorily because of misogyny, and resisting the power of that force is a bold and beautiful act. it’s important to recognize that compliance with gender roles isn’t what makes a woman a woman, and visibly defying them by being butch or gnc doesn’t reduce the impact that misogyny has on a woman – and often intensifies misogynist violence.

be good to your local butch and gnc women, especially butch/gnc trans women, intersex women and women of colour for whom defying compulsory femininity is even more dangerous.

we’re all in this together, yk? as women we all have different and often complex relationships to femininity and that’s to be expected when it’s simultaneously enforced and devalued. doesn’t mean we gotta be on different sides.

Hey so uh,

art-and-sterf:

troubled-pasta:

As a trans guy who’s been working out for a few years now and has learned a lot about their body and building muscle and whatnot in the process, here’s something I don’t see mentioned, like ever. 

Abs don’t really look Like That™

when they’re relaxed.

Here’s a few examples from a Reddit thread asking for pictures of people both flexing and not flexing their abs

image
image
image

I rarely see male body positivity posts in general but I’ve never seen this mentioned, and honestly? Call me stupid for it if you want, but I genuinely thought that super defined look was something that was achievable in a relaxed state, simply because I’ve never seen anything to the contrary. 

As someone with body dysmorphia as well as dysphoria, you can imagine the damaging effects that might have had on my mental health trying by to achieve the impossible. I can only imagine how many other masculine folk out there could be struggling with the exact same thing.

Anyway like, this is mostly to point out for masculine folks that might be pushing themselves too hard, that you’re probably doing better than you realise. 

Anecdotal stuff aside, this is an important thing for artists to remember as well! This is something I never realised despite being an artist that goes to figure drawing classes on the regular and having modelled for them myself- because of course people with abs are flexing for the poses! I was doing it too!

– Admin Pasta

lumpatronics:

butterflyinthewell:

hopelessly-paradoxical:

Can someone explain to me the differences between a form of autism and tourettes? I’m not being rude, I’m genuinely curious. I was diagnosed with tourettes as a child and somewhere along the line they switched to autism, so I don’t understand

I don’t have Tourette’s, so I can only say I know the condition involves a buildup of sensation or stress that is released when the person tics. Tics can be resisted up to a point before it comes out and may come out worse.

Stimming can have an urge or need to do it, but I can resist it if I have to and it goes away, or I can attend it later when I choose. Sometimes I start stimming without realizing I am, and once I realize I can decide if I want to keep on or stop.

Anyone with Tourettes want to chime in?

I have both, and you’re pretty accurate about the difference between Tics and Stims. If I am stressed, I can stim to calm down, and though I have a preference on what I do (shaking my hands, not quite flapping) I can choose to do a more discreet stim if the situation requires. I can also hold off entirely, and it’ll mean I can’t destress, but the situation doesn’t get worse from not stimming.

Tics on the other hand, I can’t choose and it happens before I can tell I’m doing them. One tic I have is that I’ll shrug my shoulders, and bring up my elbows. It’s a quick movement and I’ll do it several times in a row, and I cannot count the amount of poor passerbys I’ve elbowed in the face because of it. Suppressing a tic is tough since it’s much more of an impulse, and can make the situation worse for the person. Tics aren’t always caused by emotional states, but they can sure make it worse if you don’t do it. Also, I always feel like the space around my bones is… Itchy? Which is a godawful feeling.

That sounds about right to me, too.

There’s also a lot of overlap. Apparently, >20% of autistic people also have tic disorders. And >20% of kids starting out with a Tourette dx also meet autism criteria.

(I have mainly vocal tics and some physical ones, which often got treated as being purposely disruptive growing up. I didn’t recognize any of it as tics until my 30s. It can still be hard for me sometimes to figure out what’s what with some tics and stims, but mostly they do feel different. Stress does really make some of my vocal tics start exploding, but people are different.)

PSA: if you smoke marijuana, please tell your anesthesia team.

bittersnurr:

spooniestrong:

cliffnotesofanerd:

hopefullyshecannotseethis:

cliffnotesofanerd:

They’re not going to rat you out. They’re going to adjust your anesthesia dosage so you don’t WAKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF SURGERY.

Some anesthesiologists will refuse to put you under if you’ve smoked cannabis within the past 24 hours – and let’s be clear, this is NOT because they’re morally against it – it’s because THC and anesthetic react in unpredictable ways and waking up in the middle of surgery is slightly less of a concern than SLIPPING INTO A COMA OR DYING. 

So there’s that.

Yes, this too. Should have included this. It just wasn’t on my mind when I made the original post because my mind was full of NOPE NOPE NOPE after, you guessed it, one of my patients woke up in the middle of her surgery because she didn’t tell her anesthesia team she used marijuana.

Signal boosting for MMJ Spoonies! 💙

I am not sure how well I trust “they won’t rat youbout”. Yeah not to the cops probably, but if you don’t have a medical excuse they might mark you down as abusing drugs and good luck getting pain meds for recovering then.

But again this is the last DAY, if you just don’t have any the day before you don’t have to mention it period.

selection effects on perceptions of autism

stimmyabby:

cptsdcarlosdevil:

autistech:

autistech:

i think the emphasis on social behaviors in autism is probably way overblown.

if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.

and that’s not the only bias we should expect if our model of autism derives primarily from the observations of clinicians.

imagine you’re a therapist of some kind, and an autistic person shows up in your office. what is there to notice about them?

there’s the way they greet you. they way they talk, their vocabulary and sentence structure. the awkward feeling when they respond in unexpected ways to your non-verbal social signals, or fail to take turns in conversation. the way they move, how they rock back and forth or flap their hands or make other repetitive movements. the way they tend to repeat everything you say. the way they keep talking about horticulture session after session despite your every attempt to change the topic. the way they cover their eyes and start yelling when you turn the lights on or forget to hide your yellow jacket, but don’t react at all to the sound of their mother calling their name from the doorway. the way they melt down when you ask to meet at a different time next week.

you see the same behavior patterns over and over in this certain group of clients. so autism appears to be a condition characterized by 1) social deficits in emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and social participation in general; 2) repetitive movements and speech patterns, 3) unusual intense focus on highly restricted interests, 4) something really odd about how they react to sensory inputs from the environment, and 5) insistence on sameness or rigid adherence to ritualized behavior patterns.

i have blind-men-touching-an-elephant feels about this description of autism. or maybe even looking-for-your-keys-under-the-lamp-post,-even-though-that’s-not-where-you-dropped-them,-because-you-can-see-here,-and-over-where-you-dropped-them-it’s-all-dark feels.

…except like it’s not even an elephant but instead some kind of enormous dinosaur with parts that are way too high up to reach. if people try to figure out what it is by touching its feet, one person says “it’s a thing with claws”, and another person says “no, it’s a thing with feathers”, and a third person who’s very clever responds, “the underlying truth is that it’s a thing with both claws and feathers”. eventually everyone agrees that whatever the thing is, it has claws and/or feathers of various types and to varying degrees. (which just clears everything right up, yeah?)

when you can only touch its feet, there’s no way to draw a picture of anything like the real animal, because nearly all of it is out of reach. your drawing will be all feathers and claws, and no torso or tail or head or teeth. you’re not *wrong* that dinosaurs tend to have feathers and claws, but you’re missing the true shape of things anyway.

importantly, a dinosaur would have a hellofa time recognizing itself in your drawing. especially an unusually tall dinosaur, or a dinosaur with few feathers, or one who’s been filing their claws way down since age five.

autism is a cognitive/perceptual style that *impacts* socialization, movement, speech patterns, conversation topics, reactions to sensory inputs, and preferences about order and sameness. but *none* of those factors carves reality at its joints.

(you wanna know what i think autism *really* is now, right? well i’ll tell you this much: i don’t know. but i think i “weak central coherence” is a shockingly powerful working model for predicting my own experiences, even if i’m still confused.)

I agree with this post, which is why I am really sympathetic to Lynn Waterhouse’s theory that autism is actually many different underlying neurodivergences which happen to all look the same to therapists. (Analogy: fever. Fever is clearly a discrete thing, and many treatments help all kinds of fever, but sometimes you have a fever because you have a flu and sometimes you have a fever as a drug reaction and sometimes you have a fever because you have a tumor, and these are meaningfully and importantly different.)

Anyway, “weak central coherence” feels really inaccurate to describe my autism, but I resonate with Temple Grandin’s description of the verbal/logic autistic thinking style. 

if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.

jezza-riddell:

sukark:

I made this cake (without the vinegar) on Sunday and it’s still delicious and moist and amazing

also this is one of the comments on the recipe and I’m still laughing about it:

image

You know on the plus side…at least this was positive. I can’t tell you how many recipe reviews I’ve stumbled onto that were all, “This was horrible. I used olive oil instead of butter, and I swapped the pork for chicken. I decided to eliminate half the spices because I didn’t have them on hand and then I subbed lettuce because I didn’t have bok choy. I’m trying to eat less salt, so I didn’t add any soy sauce. My family wouldn’t even eat it, and I had to throw it away. 

All in all 1/10, this recipe was terrible, would not make again.”