actuallyyourreflection

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Get warm with papa

(For context this is a male rescue cat who climbed into an incubator full of orphaned kittens and went mine now)

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every fucking conversation on the internet looks like

subject matter expert: hey :) i'm here to help, i love you and this subject matter. i studied really hard and have literal years of training and experience with this. please make this 1 very small change to your life that is virtually no effort whatsoever and will help the environment and everyone around you.

random guy: i don't like that because my life will have to change. what if the change is impossible for me specifically. you cannot ask me either to stop or start an action - i will do whatever i want forever and i am offended you even asked about that because it would be a change in my life. plus what if it sounds like no effort but it's huge effort. what if i made that change and then i died because of it.

subject matter expert: again, it's not really a lot of effort, but of course we understand there might be a lot of reasons (medical, financial, etc) that you can't make this change, so we have experts who have created programs/infographics/alternatives so you can make this change smoothly. but of course maybe if it would actually kill you - we have compiled a very big list on other ways you can help out! :) we are just trying to make the world a better place for you and those around you :)

random guy: this is propaganda because of Big Subject Matter. this is going to destroy me and my life forever. where is your proof. i saw you attached studies but i don't want to read them. i really liked doing this thing to harm the environment and those around me and now they are saying that i cannot do that and i am just wondering how do we know you are an expert? my mormon lobster who uses flags to communicate has a different opinion than you and i trust Mormon Lobster . he Knows things :)

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You know how there are some songs that you listen to all the time but you listen to them in a specific way when you're having a Mental Illness Episode. and you're listening to your playlist like normal and one of those songs comes on and you realise oh we're feeling mentally ill today we're feeling funkyyyy

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new pope btw.

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birds that look like fruit <3

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They should block chatgpt on uni WiFi the way they used to block coolmathgames

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a redditor has mushrooms growing out of his homes electrical sockets

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I've been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, "Eugenics" is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it's not nearly dirty enough.

Here's a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn't about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren't leading with, "My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People."

The reason that's important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) "uncomfortably similar to eugenics"--- ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.

There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.

Here is an Internet Archive link to "Heredity in relation to eugenics," a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.

I'm afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport's word choices may provide a "red flag" to the reader: he refers to human babies as a "valuable crop," to marriage between people as "mating." The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport's perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain---they are things.

Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: "...forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation." However, relatively few people are "fully effective" at this purpose, because a proportion of society is "non-productive"---either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.

After you read the introduction of Davenport's book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.

Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people---who were, as Davenport puts it, a "burden" on society.

Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.

But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of "public health." Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don't recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.

"Sexual deviance" is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that "normal" people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.

For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.

If you read more of Davenport's book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements---he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren't. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.

Eugenics isn't just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.

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Every paragraph of this story just gets wilder and wilder. I need about five different memes based on it, stat.

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a few doors down from me my neighbors have a squirrel bar nailed to the tree in front of the sidewalk, not exactly this but something like this:

it's been there for years and they never "stock" it so it's just sitting there. anyway, i thought it would be cute to make a little squirrel out of sculpey and leave it on one of the stools in the middle of the night. i also made a little sculpey beer bottle with its own label.

it lasted exactly one day and now it is gone. it didn't fall off, i stuck it on with tape. what do you think happened to it? your most fantastical and wrong answers only, please

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all that said the guy with my car insurance company who answered the phone was so fucking funny. he had a heavy Georgia accent which endeared me to him immediately and he was sooo worried about me and apologetic that there was no one to send to my aid and I said "that's okay. if i end up missing though they're gonna interview you as the last person who heard from me. what if there's a documentary?" and he said "ooooooo, can I start drama?" I said, "well, what kind?" And he said, "I'm gonna tell them you said you saw a green flash in the sky over the field and I heard strange voices then the line went dead."

genuinely obsessed with him to this very day.

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The only thing sweeter than Dutton losing Dickson is watching McGrath have a breakdown trying to pretend nothing is going wrong

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The liberals being "wiped out of tasmania" is crazyyyy

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MASHALLAH DUTTON LOST HIS FUCKING SEAT