itsallreallythere

[itsallreallythere]

i just put the book down immediately. Let's be real, friends, I'm going to have to reread the last page when I pick it back up anyway.

Here’s something I’m curious about.

Picture this. You’re reading a book, a standard book divided into chapters. Let’s say it’s fiction (don’t know if nonfiction would get different results). You’ve been reading for a while and you want to stop for now. Assume you are not literally falling asleep, you’re still awake and lucid.

You are in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a page, somewhere in the middle of a chapter in the middle of the book.

“Power through and finish the book” is not an option, but if you really do that you have my sympathies.

[itsallreallythere]

A lot of people hate to hear this, but they in particular really need to understand it.

If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.

But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.

Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.

This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.

I'm posting at 10:30pm US Pacific time on a Sunday night, and fucking nobody is going to see this. Or reblog it. But I feel better having said it.

[itsallreallythere]

Well, it's not that last thing -- Dan Quayle came after Murphy Brown for the single mom storyline. At the time that seemed like a absolutely crazy thing to happen in politics; the vice president calling out a TV show??? There was back and forth; it was addressed in the show itself; definitely the white house arguing with a tv show. But I'll grant you that this thing is really extremely different than that thing. In a litany of unprecedented things, the unprecedentedness of this is pretty unprecedented.

Usually south park's relevancy feels very fake and surface level to me, but it's really something how trump and his base are actually, visibly much more enraged by this than they've been about any other criticism, any other show, any other enemy I've seen in the entire near-decade of his political career. Fucking South Park got to them more than the combined effort of a million other comedians, journalists, parodies, academic criticisms or protest efforts. Like it's BAD. Like they want the creators in prison and want to consider this a hate crime.

[itsallreallythere]

But you know what it is actually, is that people are just uncomfortable accepting your sympathy and your regret, and so they abjure and rebuke it by choosing an optional interpretation of the phrase. If they knew or suspected that it was all really your fault, which it is, they would probably say something more like "I accept your apology", but since you're too subtle, they're just left trying to figure out how to respond to your earnesty.

i actually get a bit annoyed with people who get a bit annoyed when people say “sorry” in response to their bad news. “why are you apologizing you didn’t do anything :/” like okay well a) you don’t know that and actually yes i am the secret architect of all your woes and have been this whole time, way to refuse to acknowledge a woman (gender neutral)’s accomplishments. and b) we’re both fluent english speakers so you know perfectly well that “sorry” isn’t always an apology and is very commonly used as an expression of general regret or sympathy. not in this case, because i have been your secret nemesis for years, meticulously plotting your every misery, but, like, in general

[itsallreallythere]

We should start web rings again

[itsallreallythere]

If it comes from parents who model the behavior they want to see, then this is good parenting.

The problem is that many parents don't model this behavior. Many parents are authoritarian and rule by fear. Many parents take advantage of the fact that they're bigger, they control the finances, their power is upheld by society, and their children are dependent on them. And they complain when their child starts treating people the exact same way.

[itsallreallythere]

Sometimes it feels like you've lived your whole life in a house that's always a little bit on fire. Like it's usually just in one room and you make sure to wet the walls around it so it doesn't spread and that usually works. You were expected to take more responsibility over fire containment when you were like seven because it's not like you can expect your parents to always be 100% on guard about making sure the whole house doesn't catch fire, and you figure that's just how things are like.

And sometimes as a kid you visit your friends' homes and some of then whisper to you - grimacing with embarrassment - about how they're not supposed to tell anyone this, but there's a whole room in their house that's currently on fire. And you're like yeah it's ok I'm not supposed to tell people about the way our house is a little bit on fire all the time, too. And then you visit some other friend's house and there's no trace of fire anywhere, and you think "wow, these people are really good at hiding their house fire."

And one day you show up to work like "hey sorry I'm late, I forgot to wet the walls before going to bed last night and my whole house burned down", and you're startled by the way people react, acting like that must be the worst thing that has ever happened to you. And you're just like "chill, it's been years since the last time this happened, and it wasn't even that bad this time", and that just makes people more shocked, acting like that's the weirdest and most concerning thing they've ever heard anyone say, which only confuses you more.

And then someone tries to explain to you that people aren't supposed to have an ongoing house fire. Most people actually never experience a house fire in their lives. Like not even once. Not even a little bit. The normal amount of having your house be currently on fire is zero.

[itsallreallythere]

"problem immigrants" they said, the way you'd talk about daisies in a golf course; like you'd talk about bees building a home in your rafters.

The Kurds are problem immigrants in Japan right now, like Pakis in the UK. I am not responsible for you being unaware of current events.

Death threats and demands for the expulsion of Kurds from Japan have escalated. One Kurdish restaurant owner received calls with such messages. Several Kurds interviewed reported to be fearing for their lives. Japanese local government employees reported being inundated with phone calls to expel the Kurds or foreigners in general. One employee reported that their entire day was taken up with dealing with such calls. One man was charged with sending death threats to a Kurdish organization; he reportedly vowed to "kill all the Kurds and feed them to the pigs".

good to know that Japanese racism has found a new target!

seems there are approximately 3,000 Kurdish people in Japan, major L for the country that it can't handle this with dignity; Australia has fifteen times as many on a per capita basis and it's absolutely fine.

[itsallreallythere]

You guys know you can't ask the predictive text bot about how it knows things, right? It doesn't know how to give you truthful answers. Only *likely* answers.

I mean, I know the redditors don't know that. But YOU GUYS know that.

people who are just finding out about internet tracking and data mining in the year 2025 and that your special robot friend does not respect your privacy lol

[itsallreallythere]

___angel wings___

a sluge 😔

[itsallreallythere]

Fucking right. If you're the boyfriend of a female comedian you know you have to be on your J O B without fail. And you gotta be so normal about it.

See if I was the boyfriend of a female comedian I would simply not be emotionally unavailable and selfish in bed and refuse to do the dishes

[itsallreallythere]

Has anyone figured out what’s so viscerally wrong with this woman yet

[itsallreallythere]

Even when people are talking about our mental illness in an attempt to destigmatize, or trying to be open and vulnerable about the problems they have, there's still going to be a really strong pressure to present a cleaned up version of it; a "things were really bad but look at me now, I'm fine now" bias.

It's easy for me to say that I was a barely functional alcoholic for a long time and that I'm kind of lucky to be alive, but nonetheless I did finish my post grad degree. That's easy to say. It's very very hard to show you how bad it got. It's hard to tell you that there was a time when I was drinking molecular grade 200 proof alcohol while sleeping at the lab for a full week because I couldn't manage to get my shit together for long enough to make a reasonable plan to finish the lab work. Molecular grade ethanol is poisonous, by the way, which I didn't much care about at the time, but it's not safe for drinking. And even trying to explain this now doesn't really show you how bad it was.

We're all trying to find a way to not be alone in our experiences of the most monstrously alone humans can possibly be. But also trying not to get to that awful horrible vulnerability, not to be so completely naked and exposed and raw as it would take to *actually* be not alone. Who could possibly love me in that state? Who could possibly see me like that and not turn away in disgust and revulsion? This is what keeps people from being able to actually show each other anything but the cleaned up, sanitized version of their dysfunction.

It always makes me feel like an alien, too.

There's a well-known thing where basically everybody experiences their finances as being tight regardless of what their income actually is, which sometimes leads to awkwardness when someone who earns three times more than you is complaining about not being able to afford stuff and it's like man what are you talking about. (There was a post going around some time ago about how this kind of thing arises from the fact that when people move upwards in terms of income they tend to put the extra money into bills-level QoL upgrades like a better home and end up with not actually that much more "spending" money than before, which seems pretty plausible but whatever it's not really relevant to the rest of this post.)

Anyway this phenomenon is pretty blatant when it's about income, which is literally a number that can be directly compared from one person to another, but there's other stuff that gives me the exact same feeling, and a big one is--by the way the rest of this paragraph is going to have very offputting whiny bitch vibes--a big one for me is often reading people talking about their mental health struggles. It happens sometimes that I'm reading something about executive dysfunction that feels very relatable and true to my experience until it becomes apparent that the speaker has somehow acquired a postgraduate degree and some useful employable skills and various energy-intensive hobbies and creative outlets; also anytime someone talking about anything autism or social anxiety-adjacent seems to nonetheless have a rich store of love and friendship in their life; I can't help but feel like, man, I don't know. I dunno if we're talking about the same thing here. I don't doubt that they're expressing a real struggle in their life, but...

This is an unhealthy impulse in me to some extent, definitely. I have a history of placing too much emphasis on wanting to relate to others via facing similar struggles and flaws, rather than via more positive things that might actually constitute fruitful common ground. There's been times when I've allowed myself to imagine a person was crazy in similar ways to me and then been disappointed when they're actually relatively stable and happy. I'm better about this stuff now than I used to be, up to a point.

But also I think the "people way richer than you feel poor" thing just has its equivalent in every domain, right. There's only a finite number of different shapes human problems can have, there's only so many complaints to choose from. Those few complaints have to cover all possible unhappiness. We're going to step on each other's toes.

[itsallreallythere]

Alien by Paolo Rivera

[itsallreallythere]

I've often wondered what Pythagoras sounded like when he was telling his followers not to eat beans, and I think it sounded like this.

anyone else's brain at any given time: (anything else)

my brain, afflicted and cursed: eating alfalfa seeds gives monkeys lupus-like autoimmune disease. eating alfalfa makes lupus mice sicker. eating alfalfa can really fucking hurt humans and cause immune system problems resembling lupus. or can worsen lupus. alfalfa. alfalfa seeds. alfalfa sprouts. an ingredient that you put on sandwiches and buy at the store. alfalfa, the plant with a friendly name. medicago sativa. funny how it is called "medic" when it can make someone need a medic. also called lucerne. the same name given to a city in switzerland, in the german-speaking portion of switzerland. do they know? do they know what alfalfa does? how do they feel about alfalfa? alfalfa, the perennial flowering plant in the legume family fabaceae. used to feed livestock since the era of ancient greeks and romans. it has a tetraploid genome, did you know? I know this now because if alfalfa can be so dangerous and I have gone so many years without knowing, what else is alfalfa fucking hiding? aside from its extensive history of harboring salmonella and e. coli. I already knew that. the L-Canavanine content is higher in seeds than in sprouts. but it is in sprouts too. alfalfa can interact with blood thinners, birth control pills, estrogens in human. it can reduce fertility in sheep and cattle. and it is not even just alfalfa with that awful amino acid. the mung bean. the green gram. the vigna radiata. used as a popular plant-based protein substitute like beyond meat and just egg. the delicious mung bean, sprouted in such a perfect way that it usually just gets called bean sprout. the bean sprout. the one delicious bean sprout, which I have loved for many years. a love that I find out now was betraying me. I used to sprout mung beans. I would watch video after video on mung bean sprouting. I did it many times. it was easy. bean sprouts become more robust when you add weight on top of them as they grow. I would eat handfuls of long and thick bean sprouts at a time. I have always asked for extra bean sprouts in my meals. they take sauce so naturally, so easily. and not one single resource on sprouting mung beans ever said that eating a ton of mung beans could ever be bad. that there are diseases where you should avoid eating mung beans. diseases that can be worsened by eating mung beans and alfalfa. I never knew. I never fucking knew. this information has been in my life less than a week and it is already taking over my brain. how many other common foods are hiding dangerous secrets? how many other common things at the store, common ingredients on a sandwich, common ingredients in a delicious bibimbap, common ingredients in plant-based protein and egg substitutes and meat substitutes can send someone to a hospital without them ever knowing why? we live in such a scary world. and all along I have been telling people that sprouting mung beans is fun and easy and safe. I had no idea. I contributed to the false sense of security with mung beans. I have been part of the problem. I just stubbed my toe writing this post. this is my punishment for sharing my love of bean sprouts with the world. I need to tell everyone. I need to tell everyone that mung beans and alfalfa can cause autoimmune activity. I need to tell everyone that mung beans and alfalfa can cause a human's immune system to attack its own body. eating alfalfa or mung bean sprouts might even help trigger autoimmune disease in people with genetic risks for autoimmunity. and avoiding eating mung bean and alfalfa might reduce someone's chance of developing autoimmune disease. how vile. how repulsive. make no mistake. canavanine toxicity has killed people. it likely killed christopher mccandless, the subject of jon krakauer's book and subsequent movie into the wild. he ate seeds of the alpine sweetvetch, which also contains this awful amino acid. when sprouted the roots taste like young carrots. where can I even fucking go from here. I thought I had a friend in mung bean, I thought I could trust alfalfa, I thought there was no harm, and it was all a lie. it was all a big fucking lie.

[itsallreallythere]

I'm going to tell my kids that Sam Reich manipulating drunk girl energy competitive spirit was Modern Money Theory

[itsallreallythere]

This is the hot philosophy content I've tuned in for

You know, the phrase "win-win" doesn't mean "literally everyone on earth benefits equally from this". It's a phrase you use when two people or things or groups might in principle be in opposition but you find a case or a deal or a strategy by which they both benefit and then you might say "win-win". And indeed some third party might lose out but that's not really precluded by this phrase in common usage, now is it? Do we wish to make that argument?