spice-ghouls

[spice-ghouls]

imo communists in the US would do well to lead nuanced discussions about how our education system works to inspire ignorance and apathy towards the wider world—it's just that the people who bring this up are less interested in overcoming this problem than in getting anti-imperialist critics to coddle them. If you recognize that you don't know something which you feel like you should have been taught in school, you can jsut look it up instead of complaining about it!

[spice-ghouls]

happy birthday silas!!!! i hope 24 treats you well & that you have a wonderful day today!!!!!

Thank you so much Jack!!!! :) 💕 hope you're doing well!!

[spice-ghouls]

[ID: Photo of a patch of yellow flowers with dark brown centers. End ID]

[spice-ghouls]

degeneration theory/the concept of social degeneration was not invented and not even popularized by the nazis (and not even by max nordau as that post going around claims), and I do think it's misleading to focus on this particular use to justify why calling people degenerate is wrong. it rests on another instance of nazi exceptionalism, as if they represented the prime example of all those ideologies.

the concept of degeneration itself is indebted to evolution theories and discourses of race and origin in the eighteenth century - the construction of a racial taxonomy where each person's individual weakening meant a weakening of their entire race, and of entire populations being, biologically, weaker or predisposed to weakness. it is also tied to progressive urbanization which generated new discourses towards "urban crowds", notably along medical and hygienic lines. these ideas mostly found footing initially in 18th century france (through the works of lamarck and buffon for example) and germany. medical developments at the time - identification of the cause for syphillis, for example, or pasteur's work on vaccines, or works on fetal alcohol snydrome - are not separable from this idea of regenerating the national stock, especially in times of national crises as was experiencing france (military defeat to prussia, declining birth rates, communist activity) at the time.

even regarding nordau, the context of the french third republic is relevant to the rise of modern zionism; theodore herzl was working as a correspondent in paris during the dreyfus affair, and was receptive both to european antisemitism and to the possibilities exemplified by the european scramble for africa regarding resource extraction and settler colonialism. but nordau didn't come up with these theories himself, and many writers, politicians, or intellectuals that now enjoy a legacy of being enlightened, progressive, modern thinkers (emile zola, arthur conan doyle, jean-martin charcot, etc.) espoused similar ideas, and understood the world in those terms, though not all of them used the word degeneration specifically (not least of all due to privileging national-made concepts in a context of inter-european conflict).

degeneration theory found its first mainstream articulation in especially scientific and medical terms with benedict morel (born almost 50 years before morau), whose ideas proved itself very relevant in the framework of the french third republic regarding social hygiene policies. this is relevant because pinning eugenistic and exterminatory politics and theories onto national socialism serves to exempt liberal european democracies in which those ideas arose and cristallized. morel was a psychiatrist who developed his theories in asylums; degeneration theory cannot be separated from the rise in psychiatric power and the expanding nosology of psychiatric disorders. the mental deficiency act of 1913 in the united kingdom, the understanding of mental illness as biologically mediated and innate, alcohol prohibition in the united states, the concept of OCD itself, or modern criminology are no less linked and indebted to degeneration theory (and its associated concepts) than nazi policies. they are in fact a continuum!

as always, this is less a case of instructing people not to use the word degenerate specifically (though I don't think anyone should!) and more about familiarizing yourself with the rhetoric around a weakening of intellectual faculties, of modernity and modern technologies leading to an irrepressible decline, of an absence of willpower leading to swathes of population becoming lazy, fat, disabled, etc., a framework that expands much beyond the category of person that uses the word degenerate!

further reading:

Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918, by Daniel Pick

Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, by Robert A. Nye

[spice-ghouls]

good post, but unfortunately you alluded to an ideal parent that a child does deserve rather than condemning the familial power structure altogether. as such I won't be reblogging have a nice night

[spice-ghouls]

thank you all so much for the kind birthday wishes on this post btw I really appreciate it :) 💗

good evening tumblr dot com. I'm 24 today

[spice-ghouls]

[ID: Two photos of sunlight shining on the surface of a large body of water. End ID]

[spice-ghouls]

good evening tumblr dot com. I'm 24 today

[spice-ghouls]

The most inconvenient truth is that men do misogyny because they get something from it. They get labor from intimate partners, they get social capital in their public circles, they get the benefit of the doubt, they get default respect and promotions and people listening to them and people afraid of them.

[spice-ghouls]

in actuality the porn bans and the age-verification shit are all mechanisms by which the incidence of childhood sexual abuse will escalate because the whole point behind them is to further the absolute control over children by their guardians by restricting them from gaining access to information that will enable them to understand themselves and their abuse and make steps to break free of it. and it is guardians of children, members of the families, with total control over children, who are incontrovertibly the ones behind the overwhelmingly vast majority of CSA. this is unquestionably NOT to protect children; it is, by design, to harm them

[spice-ghouls]

[ID: Pink sweetpea flowers growing with the sun shining behind them. End ID]

instagram | thefarmhouseflowerfarm

[spice-ghouls]

Idk if it matters, but those flowers you just did a pic ID for are peonies :)

Oh thanks! I'll update the ID

[spice-ghouls]

have been at work for hours after I was supposed to be done every single day this week because we're down a person and in the middle of a bunch of huge high-profile rush projects and my boss keeps assigning us adhoc stuff that none of us have the capacity for on top of our existing workload

[spice-ghouls]

i need you to stop trying to use the language of masc/fem in places where you're very much trying to say camab/cafab but have convinced yourself that it would be offensive to do so. i promise that in addition to being almost incomprehensible the implications of using masc/fem there are probably actually much worse

[spice-ghouls]

[ID: Four photos of two large white peonies with yellow and red centers held up in front of a grey wall. End ID]

instagram | mimosaboston

[spice-ghouls]

"gambling addiction" is kind of like if people regularly opened pits with spikes at the bottom in public areas and made lots of money from people falling into the pit and so they started greasing the edges and putting these pits in every public space and lobbying to be allowed to install them in people's homes and when someone fell into the greased spike pit in their house they said "oh thats so tragic, they had an addiction to deadly spikes, we obviously support everyone having a safe and healthy responsible relationship with the greased spike pits we're building"

[spice-ghouls]

[ID: Tags that read, "This post is stochastic terrorism". End ID]

my message to everyone who posts queer poetry is: stop what you're doing right now and gather up all your journal entries and notes app pages and etc because you could put them to better use. become a white rapper. look up some xxxtentacion type beats on youtube. I just really really want to hear this