#like it's just enough for them to ignore it and tick off their diversity box with me around but the moment I put a toe outta line they will

[erabu-san]

You are literally French. What would you know about any of this, an issue and drama stirred up by anericans.

Blackwashing exists and is used by bigots that hate white people. Its used to erase the ethnicity of asians just because people dont think they are "poc enough" because of their pale skin. Its used to demonize people with pale skin because its becoming more and more the norm to view anyone with pale skin as evil. That anyone who is "too pale" isnt enough or a human being.

They arent real people, and their skintones are fine as is. You wouldnt go up to, for example an albino or mixed race black/poc person and tell them they arent "dark enough". They dont even need to be special like that to be pale. Some just are pale.

Whether you think there should be more characters that are dark or not is not the issue. Its that you think they wouldnt be/arent good enough as is with pale skin that shows how much of a bigot you are.

Blackwashing is not the progressive act you think it is. Its obvious that your only experience with it is through genshin drama. You obviously know nothing about how much red haired pale characters & asian ones are substituted with black characters. How characters are simply replaced in the name of "diversity". How this forced inclusivity and diversity is just bigots trying to "get revenge" on the white people they hate so much, and to tick off DEI boxes on their little bigoted checklist.

You tell me to educate myself but its actually YOU who needs to be educated.

Many are complaining about sumeru and natlan characters with names similar to gods in cultures of our world that are pale when their inspiration is dark skinned. Claiming they want representation and for it to be accurate, to reflect our world on a 1-1 scale.

Yet these same people will make xiao, zhongli, Ei, and many more asian characters darker " because asians can be dark skinned too". Yet so can mostly dark skinned races be pale.

So why cant you (gen) respect such characters, who are gods and divine beings based on a culture where pale is more beautiful, and gods of such cultures are pale?

There is hypocrisy in everything to do with blackwashing. Its okay when its done to pale characters because in real life black people have been oppressed? But these characters are not real, nor are they a reflection of our reality, as far as we have seen they dont even have racism in this fictional world.

It is one thing to explore a character like with the recent hatsune miku trend, atleast there most people arent going at each other's throats saying black miku is better than japanese miku(as far as i have seen)

Seriously how can you even begin to justify this. And who ever told you that dark skinned characters "scare white people" is an absolute fucking liar trying to justify their own bigotry towards white people.

No black washing IS just as disgusting as whitewashing. Neither should exist, and you shouldn't feed into the stupid circle jerk of bigotry that both of them are.

Aaaah that's what I like ! Yes ! Thank you for telling me your opinion, explaining what is wrong. I absolutely love to learn, and I prefer to read this long text calling me ignorant and explaining why that just a simple text of you saying you are annoyed by a fanart.

Thank you for telling me ! First yes I am french, and indeed my culture has more an european pov. But again, I also grow up as a minority "race" with my parents culture !🙏 in france, i don't look like a french. Well. Still I am aware that it doesn't remove anything from what I said

And I totally agree with you, some are just pale !! It just happens I draw Kinich black because I like it like this. Is Kinich true inspiration are actually pale ? Tell me more, I wish to learn !!

Tbh when you talk abt gods being pale is beautiful, I thought about Nahida. I did research when she were out and yes, I do agree, there is character who are fine as they are.

And because I live in France I also see "dark skin scare white" as a true fact. It happens and it is harmful. 🧍 not only in France tho, in country where pale skin is portrayed as beautiful, people who have tan skin are less represented even if it is the majority. I suppose the contrary happens too !!

"Character are not real" and yet you are annoyed, I guess it is the action of "blackwash" that make you mad, more than "a fictional character w diffent skin tone" tho! My opinion is fiction does affect real world, as do real life affects fiction, and this is something I won't debate on

"They don't have racism in this fictional world" sorry but it does in Sumeru. 🙏 about this one npc she is reject by forest and desert because of them being mixed, desert not being access to book and even Cyno said his scholarship was complicated because he is from desert

If you wish to continue, please send me DM with arguments. I don't know if I would change my mind of not drawing Kinich pale, but I am super interested about what you have to say !! 👍👍

[brittapcrrys]

admins, u really gotta stop putting shit like “for every [x number of] white muse/s you play, your next must be a person of colour [i usually see it as a 1:1 ratio but have seen 2:1 and worse before].............. OR otherwise diverse in some way”

so we’re still acting like various “types” of diversity, representation & inclusion are ALL interchangeable? as though the idea that ‘for every one (1) cis, abled, thin, white fc/muse under 40.................... the next one’s just gotta tick ONE of those ~ID diversity~ boxes’ is somehow fair and balanced and reasonable???

like ??!!? really? a faceclaim of colour can be ignored in this situation if ur gonna play.....a 60yo white fc, a fat OR disabled OR trans white fc? just so long as they are diverse in ONE way, that balances everything out fairly, yeah? [/sarcastic slant, and pointed rhetorical questions. for now]

for every 1 white muse, your next MUST be a muse of colour. always. it should be at least 2 muses of colour for every 1 white muse imo but im just trying to dig away at the bare minimum of respect and inclusion, here. and an admin team’s responsibility cannot just be to passively encourage it, sort of, maybe ‘we can’t force anyone to do anything hehe sorry’. if you can demand certain fc/oc age rules, activity limits, muse numbers per person, members in the group, post formatting etc........................ expecting and enforcing ‘stricter’ rules to ENSURE greater diversity in characters / from your members is a MUST.

and that’s the obvious one to start with and the easiest one to define a minimum ratio for, because, like, if we’re going on real global demographic statistics (even in our silly little made up idealistic fantasy writing worlds), then characters of colour SHOULD be the majority by a significant margin! asking for 1:1 is letting ppl off pretty damn easily!! (this is without even going into how some ppl with Tick That Box, every single time it’s required, with a fc who is mixed, white-passing or has lighter skin... im white, im repeating ideas i’ve read from muns of colour over the last few years, and im not digging further into this here but there’s a pattern of it that needs to be acknowledged and improved - but not at the expense of the experiences and inclusion of those fcs and muns of similar backgrounds. i am not saying it is only 1 or the other bc apparently ppl take it that way smfh)

the ~ratios~ and expectations you said for gender, body diversity, disability, & sometimes age (though like.... groups that set age diversity at 35&up are reaaalllly testing my patience) are sort of.....a grey area, im not equipped to say ‘this is the Correct and Precise number u need to enforce’. personally? i think if you have a player with 2 characters, 1 of them should (as well as, obviously, at least 1 of the 2 being a muse of colour) fit into one of these ~additional diversity categories~ which feels very fucking “ugh corporate mandates spreading the political correctness extremes down the chain now” gross to name it that but it’s 2:40am and this is mostly a vent / rant, likely to be deleted within 24-28hrs. again imo, 3 muses should be a 2:1 FCoC:whitefc ratio, and you need to be including at least 2 of the other lines of diversity in ur fc and character choices (how that’s done -, separately i.e. 1 is an amputee and another is genderfluid; or ‘combined’ i.e. a fat disabled muse & a 50yo trans woman - im v flexible on but like the more u up ur character count the more im gonna expect myself & others to be looking at fcs and muses with overlapping ‘diversity criteria’). but maybe ur a 1 in 3 kinda person, 1 in 4 is probably pushing it, and frankly anything more ‘lenient’ than that is just the admin team not caring enough abt these groups of people or prioritizing their visibility and inclusion in their group.

there’s more but this is already longer than i wanted it to be, and im getting more unsettled abt the clumsy wording by the second, & ALSO wanting to re-/over-explain every single point again to justify myself to all possible reader interpretations so. that is a sign to Quit.

[ofcloudsandstars]

omgg so today when I was on a break I had a phone call with one of my witch friends and I was telling her about all these great things happening that makes me feel so grateful but now I am kind of being confronted by my cowardice? Like it’s a new shadow side of me that’s like the next boss fight I have to get over but now that I’ve reached this area of accomplishment and new privilege I have the opportunity to tune out things that no longer impact me that may negatively impact others, but obviously I don’t want to be this way but also it’s like I now have so much to lose since I’ve built up so much here. 

 I was giving her recent examples like recently I went to this protest (and protests give me so much anxiety with crowds and police surrounding them) in Hackney cause they are trying to get rid of a women’s shelter cause it’s prime real estate and they’re assholes and all of these people affect by the kindness of this shelter came to speak on how it’s helped them and their family not fall into the cracks of neglect by society that failed them and this woman from NO WHERE with the most wild expression on her face runs up to the stage to potentially do something malicious to the BLM organizer there but before she gets close, a dogpile of police just launch onto her in the most violent frenzy that erupted like it happened so fast you could not even keep up and then protesters start surrounding them trying to break up the fight but then policemen are swinging fists and batons at them. Naturally the organizer is upset cause this also feels staged with the woman as a distraction that popped off right during the BLM speech so she says to us: Since the police can’t behave themselves we are going to claim the streets. Omg my heart was in my stomach. Everyone just got onto the main road on Hackney and sat their ass down on the pavement and blocked traffic. People in cars were mad, double decker buses honking, there were police TRUCKS showing up surrounding us.. I really just wanted to run 😂 I just got promoted that day to a bougie desk job with private healthcare and benefits in central london (a millenial’s dream since the bar is so fucking low for us lol) and I was like omg what if I end up in jail for sitting in a street blocking traffic? I did keep my ass there and tried to put up protective wards and channel energy to allow me to fly off in case it needed but I had to fight every anxious fiber of my being to stay in that street with everyone else. Luckily the woman leading the protest knew how to command a space, like she had so much power and wisdom in her as a leader and she came to the street with a loud speaker and said: ok we got their attention and they learned their lesson so now that everyone has calmed down we can go back.. I was also glad I did not run away cause like.. every black witch I have met in London throughout these 2 years just happened to be at the protest. London feels like a village, you can run into so many people in one space. 

Anyway I was giving other examples recently too where I had to face a fear and conscientiously realize that I could walk away cause I had the privilege to do so instead of risking my safety to help uplift others but like obviously I felt like if I had walked away in any of these situations it would start to turn me into something shadowy and stunted. But it’s interesting to acknowledge there is this aspect of shadow within me. I think maybe because before when I felt I had nothing to lose I didn’t care but now it’s like oh shit I feel like I’ve made it to some degree after YEARS of suffering and struggling and thinking I would never accomplish making it anywhere in life and now my life is synced with this weird lesson I have to learn. On top of that I just got an offer to do ayahuasca with a witch and alchemist I greatly revere but I feel like the whole trip and purging is going to just be me facing my cowardice on some psychadelic neon tropical house of horrors ride lmao.  Anyway the main point of bringing this up, speaking of synchronicities while I was on the phone chatting to her about this I see this man on a bike with the most ominous expression on his face riding so quickly with a bag and it looks so suspicious but I am like: omg mind your business.. Then seconds later a woman and man come running frantically and the woman is in severe distress cause the guy on the bike stole her bag. Omgg. My friend was on the phone with me as I was chatting about me trying to face the fact that I want to have more courage and take risks and stand up for others even if it means risking what I have and then she witnessed this whole drama with the thief and bag on the phone 😂 like it was terrible I was feeling like should I have done something but honestly he was moving really fast and I could have gotten like hurt if he was armed cause he had a kind of malicious vibe about him. I did stay to tell the policeman his details and pointed out the street CCTV so I hope I helped in that way :/ 

Anyway that’s a life update. 

[kendrixtermina]

Sigh. Chibnall.

Jodie Whittaker and demographic realism

So I want to make clear that I have no problems whatsoever with Jodie Whittaker’s performance - the character seamlessly kept walking across the screen, she has great energy, love the steampunk goggles. 

Honestly I’ve always believed that giving existing characters a demographic change is not really as revolutionary or helpful as ppl think; New characters and stories (esp. told by writers of those samedemographics) solve the problem much better. Keeping specificity is often better than losing it, and the character still has a background (from an “advanced” civilization that used to do dirty deeds and is still kind of uppity attitudes, a character who’s decided to be against that attitude but still needs to be knocked own from the occasional uppity moment; It makes sense for them to look like a british dude, and they have the freedom to go wherever problems like sexism and racism don’t exist so... ), and will be linked to its origin.  But at worst something that will look dated in a few years like the 80s outfits, the show’s done dated and crowdpleasing before; There’s no hard reason not to do it and I expected no quality dip. 

It certainly worked as as attention grab, the premiere drew a lot of attention but that only lasted as long as it took for the reviews to go sour. But one of the main good things its proponents said could come of it was to help the lack of female anti heroes. So far she really didn’t get to anti hero much; It’s not Whittaker, it’s the scripts. 

I want to make this clear: Varied demograpics are good; 

This is why I kind of hate the term “diversity” is one of those vague euphemisms if you mean “demographic representation”, “social equity” or “demographic realism” just say that. 

In a way this is a good thing, it used to be only the best boldest writers who could get away, noadays it has become acceptable to have varied casts. And that’s how it should be artshouldn’t have to have to pass some arbitrary quality standard to simply reflect reality. But as the rebootverse and star trek discovery should’ve proved realistic demographics can’t replace good writing. Sometimes lack of realistic demographis is associated with bad writing because both come from play-it-safe more-of-the-same consummerism focussed sameyness, often someone who goes against the formulas has a solid vision which makes them good, and focussing on ignored topics and perspectives can yield new ideas (consider stuff like Wonder Woman, Get Out, Black Panther... which were just good, novel movies) but you could have a super interesting memorable story where everyone is a medieval european monk, but the characters are differentiated by personality, attitude, beliefs, or something where the cast ticks all sort of all demographic boxes but the characters are 1D and the story trite and predictable

On the one hand you get those gamergate adjacent fanboys who make “diversity” and “good writing” out to be enimical opposites and then you have the purists/antis who treat any critique of writing to be founded in having something against realistic demographics. You need both! 

Series 11

There were good things about it: An attempt at leastto do more of your classic thought provoking space operas or going back to the shows’ pulp fiction roots, covering some historic periods/topics other than the classic historical fiction tropes (they got a pakistani writer, had Yaz and Ryan discuss social topics among themselves etc.), the emotional story centered around this family coping with a loss, having Ryan sort of be the “main” companion and the one the rest of the team is protective of

But overall the reason I didn’t rush to watch s12 as soon as it came out is that it was a bit... bland. The team interacted mostly with each other; The Doctor had more charge with one shot characters like King James or the Solitract than she really did with the companions. Graham was such a missed opportunity. Remember how everyone loved the dynamic with Wilfred? No attempt to strike a bond over how they’re the older party members, or the professional xenophile trying to nudge the bilbo baggins like reluctant hero? We’re told the Doctor really likes Yaz, and I believe it cause she always liked people like that, but are we shown?

For all that Moffat and RTD were very different writers with different strenghts and weaknesses, both were very character-driven writers, and that was really missing here a bit. 

Some ppl said they didn’t give Yaz enough screentime or personality - but the thing is, they did try. They just failed. They let her make little remarks here and there about her homelife, they just never really assembled into a whole beyond buzzwords and inspirational platitudes and the Standard Companion Traits. I didn’t get a read on what she’s about or who she’s like until the pakisan episode where she unlike Barbara, Donna etc. immediately accepted that the past can’t be changed. Ah, I finally thought, she’s a very responsible dutiful person.

Everything lacks edges and defining moments. 

So far, I didn’t sweat it. I though, ok, not everything can be the high-concept character driven spec fic epic type of story that is my personal favorite. Every time there was some addition to the mythos in any way someone cried ruined forever. When the time lords first appeared. When the time war was introduced. 

The classics too were lower on the character driven ness; Still good pulp fiction content. (imho the character concepts themselves were often pretty good, just not used to the fullest and some of the actresses were treated crappy backstage)

I thought “okey, it wouldn’t be good to break with the tradition of making the sussequent incarnations contrasting”

I did think that there was much liberty with the additions which the others did do only towards the end when it feltmore earned, but, the addition of say, sisters, isn’t too disruptive

Series 12 and the Timeless Child Nonsense

The frustrating thing about this is that it COULD have been good. 

The Master teaming up with the cybermen to try and take over Gallifrey is precisely the sort of story the classics would’ve done. 

“Your society is founded on a shady secret and exploitation of the innocent” is a good plot twist especially in these times. The Master finding that secret and using it to his advantage - also very him. 

Imagine what it could have been like if it had been approached from the perspective of someone who, for all that they were a rebel, still sort of profited from being part of that society, someone who wants to take responsibility for that past and would maybe have to make some tough choice to let the exploitation victim go because it’s right even if it has cosequences for themselves and their civilization. 

but then you ruin that by immediately taking the protagonist out of that society. They and they alone are the victim. 

like this plot could have been good except for the twist that the Doctor and the timeless child are the same. 

Not connecting it to existing lore about the earlier war game days, everything with Omega and Rassilon, that bit about the Time Lord becoming what they were through exposure to the untempered schism... that might be forgiven. Even if it does stretch the suspension of disbelief that every single piece of sci fi scanning equipment in the show didn’t pick anything up; Not to mention that it destroys the stake on every heroic sacrifice or death prophecy plot, every time a companion or oneshot character took the bullet, the whole “out of regens” plot...

This is not me being mad about things being added or changed, but this being done in such a way that undermines the philosophy, the whole flavor... 

Yes, the MC is mysterious, the 7th Doctor arcs did a lot with this etc. but doesn’t spelling something out this clear not deplete rather than add to that? It#s a definite answer even if the final origin isn’t clear. 

But they’re so much else.

The trickster hero accomplishing great deeds with planning, guile, improvisation and duct tape, the implicit value that ressourcefulness trumps raw power. 

The rebel, different because they chose to be or made themselves to be such through their adventures, sticking to their own values in a close-minded society - who embodies & encourages thinking for yourself in every situation and universal plot, who battles enemies like the Daleks and Cybermen that represent comformity

Yeah they have many names yeah they take out gods... but all this was the result of their actions & path in pursuit of knowledge, and also, as Moffat once stated, the funny part is that behind all the fearsome reputation is wit and duct tape. 

The fish in a small pond who started out a misfit, failed their tardis driving exam... etc. and often made a point that they didn’t want immortality or endless godlike power. That’s meaningless if they had it to begin with. 

The explorer who wanted to see more than their corner of the world. 

The ANTI HERO that’s made alltogether too tragic here, too absolved from their uppity civilization

All that is wiped away if they were this special creature to begin with.

Where WAS the philosophy, rly? The big humanist speeches that made me love the show. 

Going Forward

So I think - I HOPE - that this in particular will be treated like the “half human” thing from the TV movie or the now josses additional origin stories from the audios, or be handwaved under the “you cant get it wrong cause everything is in flux” carpet

It’s the Master effing with her to pay her back for the half broken chameleon arch thing. 

It’s possible the Child actually existed, long dead or trapped somewhere - again, dirty mystery at the bottom of a stck-up society is a good twist. but this shouldn’t be more than another maybe in the multiple choice past not a definite answer. 

Also, i hate this line of thought but I can’t stave it off: Why is is now that the MC looks female that we get this vulnerable, passively victimized tomato surprise rather than something with an ugly but definite choice in it. 

I will probably ignore it - parts of me resents this cause “your civilization is based on a lie” could be such a good plot twist (then again the existing twists to that end from the classics and End of Time do enough rly) but if i have to choose between that and the basic meaning of the character....

[incarnateirony]

To the Nonnie that left a 5 parter in my inbox:

I am not going to post your nonsense.

I am not going to circulate your redefinitions, your new goalposts, your explicit deletion and argumentation against a far larger bulk of openly identified bisexual people, and your raging. I have already addressed these, and they boil down to “You’re literally destructive to the LGBT battle while you think you’re being progressive.”

I am not going to be part in circulation people’s own manufactured dialogues they put between their own ears anymore.

You are not promised platform. You are not promised my inbox. You are not promised any specific performance from LGBT creators within the demographic they are writing the text that would be representative in if you have paid *zilch* attention to their working conditions.

In fact, you literally don’t even get to fucking pretend you’re here about representation while *overtly denying the words, sociopolitical representation commentary, and working conditions of the LGBT creators you’re hot dogging right now*. Half the fucking fight is also behind the scenes GETTING LGBT CREATORS CREATING, even if at times they’re limited. 

Representation isn’t just on screen, diversity in writing crews behind scene is the fight, and if you pretend it isn’t just to gang bang LGBT creators for not performing how you want, without *ANY* fucking human consideration for why things are the way they are? *You, deep down, don’t give a shit about representation, or production team diversity, or LGBT creators -- you give a shit about getting exactly what you want exactly the way you want without even recognizing that may not be universal to LGBT people as proven by my notifs right now -- and largely with the reductionist point of wanting to win against trolls on the internet at which point YOU HAVE LEFT THE REPRESENTATION WHEELHOUSE (x); or if you do truly believe what some rando -- probably a woman, rather than the LGBT male POV -- said, you need to DRAMATICALLY RE-ALIGN AND CONSIDER YOUR POV*

“The whole idea of representation” that you have is close, but still a made up thing. It’s what perfect representation is. It’s not what the battle is. It’s never been what the battle is.

So just because you’ve dreamed up, say, a GA opposed to you, while the GA openly fucking talks about all this shit (right down to “marriage/dark point in the romance/divorce/breakup), on non-fansite major news publications, rather than fangirls that are scared of losing their website traffic in this fucking bog of bitterness, liars, extortionists and tinhats?

It doesn’t fucking matter.

Text is text is text. Queer text is queer text no matter how upset you get on if it was *visible* enough for you. That will continue to stay true. It will continue to be true when you make GA monsters in your head that don’t exist anywhere in reality. It will continue to stay true when you want to argue with a clout monkey that doesn’t even believe what they say. It’s going to be true. 

It’s fine to want more visible text. That IS the nature of the fight. The nature of the fight is NOT deleting low visibility text. And i’m going to ask you to PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS FUCKING HOLY, ACTUALLY EDUCATE YOURSELF ON LGBT MEDIA HISTORY AND THE REPRESENTATION BATTLE.

Not just a random link convenient to someone’s article that vague blogs the general history. Actually educate yourself if you’re going to get in this fight because HOLY SHIT the children that have tried have *MISERABLY FUCKED UP* and then quite unfortunately normalized that fucking up, that everybody thought it was the new brand of woke because of herd mind.

If you’ve internalized enough phobia from the abusive manipulations within this fandom that you’ve convinced yourself bisexual people are *SO DAMN INVISIBLE* that nobody gets what’s going on while the GA is all “SHIT MAN THEY GOT A DIVORCE T_T”, that’s a you thing.

I am not your therapist. I am not your mother. I can not *force* you to get in touch with what the GA, or the creatives, or anyone else has said on anything related to this content, because I’ve been blogging it all and here you are, clearly not reading any of it. I can not force you to stop erasing LGBT text you, personally, nonniemcnonface, don’t like the visibility of. BUT I CAN STRONGLY ENCOURAGE IT.

But nobody owes you anything. Not my inbox. Not the platform on my blog. Not *your, specific, preferred, very precise point of view*. When you are a middle aged LGBT cis man raised in the 80s in patriarchal environments, and/or hold a great deal of conversation explicitly with the demographic and its representation in question, and by that I mean not 1, 2, 3, or even just 10 LGBT men within a step of that demographic. Because that’s the story of the character being told. It’s not *your* story. It’s a story you may resonate with depending how close to it you are. But *that* is what representation is: creating a universal platform of diverse, queer stories until it is saturated into the media to such an extent you *will* eventually find someone that ticks all your demographic boxes when you turn on your TV (be that race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, or whatever else.) Demanding everyone’s unilateral demands be met when they aren’t even in the intersectional demographic isn’t representation. It’s tokenization. It’s the exact same way we end up with stereotyped gays to try to fit everyone’s “visibility” wants. It’s why there IS such a problem with LGBT male and, most explicitly, bisexual male representation. You are making half of the problem unto yourselves.

Until then, you don’t get to talk over those people. No matter how many anons you send thinking it sounds *gr8* because you haven’t read the entire discussion, you just got *mad* at part of it and didn’t want to introspect. That? That’s a problem.

Let’s say you work at Subway and they say you can only put 6 olives on a footlong without charging extra. Your boss vaguely holds that up but doesn’t micro count your olives so sometimes you give them 7 or 8 because you feel bad, and you want to give as much as you can to the customers. But if corporate notices somehow you’re burning through a shit ton of olives, it doesn’t matter what your intent is. It doesn’t matter if your manager agrees. If corporate comes down and tells you to stop putting down extra olives, you have a choice to completely quit/be fired from making sandwiches for people or to comply. Or, at least, to wait long enough to squeak new extra olives in.

*WelComE tO thE coRporAte chAIN and AduLT reALitY* -- Bobo sitting here piling as many olives on as he can until magically suddenly stopping for a year at a time and then y’all are bitching because he didn’t put the whole assed olive tree on your sandwich. When you get up to the counter, and start throwing a goddamn shitfit, you are now Karen. Don’t be Karen.

And no, Karen demanding that if she can't have as many olives as she wants then nobody should get any olives and to stop putting down olives is not anywhere in touch with functional reality.

And UNTIL you learn to pay attention to what the LGBT cis male raised in the 80s middle aged author on crew says on *this specific topic*, who was writing on sociopolitical LGBT representation issues probably since you were in *diapers*, and the methodology and struggles therein? You don’t really get a say. Once you’re able to sociopolitically contend with what that very author postured about representation *16 years ago* and have an equally well addressed set of points, then you can at least hold debate with his ideas. Until then, this is “WHAT I WANT BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH”

Go away.

Like god fucking damn Bobo “I stand in front of ICE walls”, “fuck every candidate but Bernie sanders” Berens, highly progressive left wing sociopolitical queer author still fucking understood incrementalization 16 years ago can you all fucking CATCH UP?

He didn’t fucking like it, but he understood it. He addressed it as a necessary evil that has been formative in our process and progress and expansion in visibility. You don’t have to like it either, but just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean you can’t *understand* why it works like that. Just like “text that isn’t visible enough for you is still text”, “real world issues and methods you don’t like are still real even if you don’t like them.” Bobo got it. Your turn. Cuz he doesn’t have to like his working conditions. But he can work through them the best he can. And addressed this many moons before ever writing his first SPN episode that was the first recorded time a showrunner told them to lean into it being played like lovers. Yeah. That? That was Bobo’s episode. In fact, 99% of the shit y’all uwu about is Bobo’s. Steve. Collette. The mixtape. The breakup. Gosh golly gee it’s almost like he’s fighting his ass off to tell you a story in what incremental methods he’s allowed and you’re all just trying to fuck him for it. Hell even this episode in question, Jeremy’s, Jeremy went out of his way to thank Bobo for all his guidance and help.

We’ve made progress via incrementalization, and just because you can name a few other shows that have entirely different bankrolling, marketing, distributions, demographics, that HAvE gAy shIT doesn’t mean shit. You don’t think every product a store sells comes from the same production line in the same premises with the same materials and the same target audience when they sell a wide brand of merchandise, do you? I promise you Great Value macaroni is managed and distributed differently than LED light bulbs and bicycles. These are not the same products.

The presumptuous, self-serving, personalized and franky manufactured wants and demands cloaked in a representation suit while choosing to do active harm to what progress we have -- intentionally ignorant to the actual representation battle and imagining what it is, and is like, and is about -- literally talking over the long-standing voicebox of an LGBT creator making the content who has been ENGAGED. IN THIS FIGHT. SINCE MOST OF YALL. WERE IN KINDERGARTEN? It’s fucking gross. It’s manipulative. It’s abusive. Maybe you’ve been manipulated into not understanding that, and you really believe what you say, I really don’t fucking know. But I do know you need a HUGE crash course in HOW THIS ALL WORKS and WHAT THE TARGET POINTS AND METHODOLOGICAL TARGETS ARE.

There is no magic clap on clap off bullshit. That isn’t how. It works. If it worked like that, we wouldn’t HAVE a fucking fight. (Imagine thinking that critically. Please, I beg you.)

[zizekianrevolution]

Everyone is familiar with the sorts of jobs whose purpose is difficult to discern: HR consultants, PR researchers, communications coordinators, financial strategists, logistics managers. The list is endless. In 2015, YouGov, a polling agency, asked Britons whether they believed their job made a “meaningful contribution to the world.” More than a third—37 percent—believed it did not. (Only 50 percent said that it did; 13 percent were uncertain.) A more recent poll conducted in the Netherlands found that 40 percent of Dutch workers felt their job had no good reason to exist. Our society values work. We expect a job to serve a purpose and to have a larger meaning. For workers who have internalized this value system, there is little that is more demoralizing than waking up five days a week to perform a task that one believes is a waste of time. It’s not obvious, however, why having a pointless job makes people quite so miserable. After all, a large portion of the workforce is being paid—often very good money—to do nothing. They might consider themselves 
fortunate. Instead, many feel worth-less and depressed. In 1901, the German psychologist Karl Groos discovered that infants express extraordinary happiness when they first discover their ability to cause predictable effects in the world. For example, they might scribble with a pencil by randomly moving their arms and hands. When they realize that they can achieve the same result by retracing the same pattern, they respond with expressions of utter joy. Groos called this “the pleasure at being the cause,” and suggested that it was the basis for play. Before Groos, most Western political philosophers, economists, and social scientists assumed that humans seek power out of either a desire for conquest and domination or a practical need to guarantee physical gratification and reproductive success. Groos’s insight had powerful implications for our understanding of the formation of the self, and of human motivation more generally. Children come to see that they exist as distinct individuals who are separate from the world around them by observing that they can cause something to happen, and happen again. Crucially, the realization brings a delight, the pleasure at being the cause, that is the very foundation of our being. Experiments have shown that if a child is allowed to experience this delight but then is suddenly denied it, he will become enraged, refuse to engage, or even withdraw from the world entirely. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francis Broucek suspected that such traumatic experiences can cause many mental health issues later in life. Groos’s research led him to devise a theory of play as make-believe: Adults invent games and diversions for the same reason that an infant delights in his ability to move a pencil. We wish to exercise our powers as an end in themselves. This, Groos suggested, is what freedom is—the ability to make things up for the sake of being able to do so. The make-believe aspect of the work is precisely what performers of bullshit jobs find the most infuriating. Just about anyone in a supervised wage-labor job finds it maddening to pretend to be busy. Working is meant to serve a purpose—if make-believe play is an expression of human freedom, then make-believe work imposed by others represents a total lack of freedom. It’s unsurprising, then, that the first historical occurrence of the notion that some people ought to be working at all times, or that work should be made up to fill their time even in the absence of things that need 
doing, concerns workers who are
 not free: prisoners and slaves. Historically, human work patterns have taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. Farming, for instance, is generally an all-hands-on-deck mobilization around planting and harvest, with the off-seasons occupied by minor projects. Large projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast tend to take the same form. This is typical of how human beings have always worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the opposite effect. One reason that work was historically irregular is because it was largely unsupervised. This is true of medieval feudalism and of most labor arrangements until relatively recent times, even if the relationship between worker and boss was strikingly unequal. If those at the bottom produced what was required of them, those at the top couldn’t be bothered to know how the time was spent.  Most societies throughout history would never have imagined that a person’s time could belong to his employer. But today it is considered perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent out a third or more of their day. “I’m not paying you to lounge around,” reprimands the modern boss, with the outrage of a man who feels he’s being robbed. How did we get here? By the fourteenth century, the common understanding of what time was had changed; it became a grid against which work was measured, rather than the work itself being the measure. Clock towers funded by local merchant guilds were erected throughout Europe. These same merchants placed human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves that they should make quick use of their time. The proliferation of domestic clocks and pocket watches that coincided with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century allowed for a similar attitude toward time to spread among the middle class. Time came to be widely seen as a finite property to be budgeted and spent, much like money. And these new time-telling devices allowed a worker’s time to be chopped up into uniform units that could be bought and sold. Factories started to require workers to punch the time clock upon entering and leaving. The change was moral as well as technological. One began to speak of spending time rather than just passing it, and also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an episodic style of working was increasingly treated as a social problem. Methodist preachers exhorted “the husbandry of time”; time management became the essence of morality. The poor were blamed for spending their time recklessly, for being as irresponsible with their time as they were with their money. Workers protesting oppressive conditions, meanwhile, adopted the same notions of time. Many of the first factories didn’t allow workers to bring in their own timepieces, because the owner played fast and loose with the factory clock. Labor activists negotiated higher hourly rates, demanded fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, twelve- and then eight-hour work shifts. The act of demanding “free time,” though understandable, reinforced the notion that a worker’s
time really did belong to the 
person who had bought it. The idea that workers have a moral obligation to allow their working time to be dictated has become so normalized that members of the public feel indignant if they see, say, transit workers lounging on the job. Thus busywork was invented: to ameliorate the supposed problem of workers not having enough to do to fill an eight-hour day. Take the experience of a woman named Wendy, who sent me a long history of pointless jobs she had worked: “As a receptionist for a small trade magazine, I was often given tasks to perform while waiting for the phone to ring. Once, one of the ad- sales people dumped thousands of paper clips on my desk and asked me to sort them by color. She then used them interchangeably. “Another example: my grandmother lived independently in an apartment in New York City into her early nineties, but she did need some help. We hired a very nice woman to live with her, help her do shopping and laundry, and keep an eye out in case she fell or needed help. So, if all went well, there was nothing for this woman to do. This drove my grandmother crazy. ‘She’s just sitting there!’ she would complain. Ultimately, the woman quit.” This sense of obligation is common across the world. Ramadan, for example, is a young Egyptian engineer working for a public enterprise in Cairo. The company needed a team of engineers to come in every morning and check whether the air conditioners were working, then hang around in case something broke. Of course, management couldn’t admit that; instead, the firm invented forms, drills, and box-­ticking rituals calculated to keep the team busy for eight hours a day. “I discovered immediately that I hadn’t been hired as an engineer at all but really as some kind of technical bureaucrat,” Ramadan explained. “All we do here is paperwork, filling out checklists and forms.” Fortunately, Ramadan gradually figured out which ones nobody would notice if he ignored and used the time to indulge a growing interest in film and literature. Still, the process left him feeling hollow. “Going every workday to a job that I considered pointless was psychologically exhausting and left me depressed.” The end result, however exasperating, doesn’t seem all that bad, especially since Ramadan had figured out how to game the system. Why couldn’t he see it, then, as stealing back time that he’d sold to the corporation? Why did the pretense and lack of purpose grind him down? A bullshit job—where one is treated as if one were usefully employed and forced to play along with the pretense—is inherently demoralizing because it is a game of make-­believe not of one’s own making. Of course the soul cries out. It is an assault on the very foundations of self. A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.

David Graeber 

[bananadineapple]

Distraction >> phase one.

PROMPT: It's Y/N's birthday. The Avengers thought they had the surprise birthday party all planned until Y/N comes in a little too early. Their distraction plan for such a meticulous woman; A classic Barnes seduction that could have all her defenses shut down in seconds.

PAIRING: Bucky x slightlyOCD!Reader

WORD COUNT: 1,896

WARNINGS: Language, a bit of NSFW (just a teensy bit)

Masterlist

Phase 1 >> Phase 2

+

"WHAT?!"

The whisper actually turned into an echoing shout of disbelief ironically coming from the sly Black Widow. The moment FRIDAY had popped up from the screen and announced the arrival of Y/N, it had everyone stopped dead on their heels. If one were to look at what was happening within the Stark tower at that moment, a celebration was brewing.

Y/N's birthday. It was no doubt that everyone who is everyone in the Avengers loved her dearly, an obvious favorite most especially to Natasha, Steve, and Thor. So an idea sparked between the three and soon had it all laid out; a suprise birthday party.

Until trouble brewed in and HYDRA sent one of their most powerful experimental weapons on an attempted attack to SHIELD, to which the Avengers had to quickly respond to without any second thoughts. Soon enough, the others had realized their plan was way behind schedule to be accomplished overnight, and resulted into the chaos plummeting through the floor.

"I told you we should've left Steve, Wanda and Thor to get started yesterday!" Nat shifts the blame to Tony, who was the one who led the mission.

"It's not my fault Hydra sent in huge ass bogies!" Tony exclaims in his notorious defensive tone, "And hey I didn't even get a thank you for bringing Wanda in who saved your life!"

"Nat, Tony, this is not a good time to argue, we need to get this all done!" In his ever so composed voice, Steve's voice gently rings with a demand that seemed to always do the trick to get the Avengers in order. "Tony, just keep reaching out to the other guests and the caterer. Nat, fix up whatever Y/N has to wear in her room. Let's focus now guys, our birthday girl's in no rush but we are!"

"Ten minutes, sir." FRIDAY muses alarmingly.

Steve sighed deeply, thinking he already had it all together. It sent Bruce into panicking circles around while holding the last minute decorations in his arms, with Thor picking up the notch with aggressively wrapping the gifts, and Wanda fiddling the food array quickly with her powers.

"Popcorn to your left!" Wanda warns hurriedly as she flicks her hand to command the delicate bowl of popcorn to its place.

"Thor, how are the presents doing?" Clint says without turning from where he was firing up some streamers to the ceiling. "Almost done?"

"In a minute!" The confused Asgardian had no clue to such earthly gifts, resulting in oddly colored wrappings.

Amidst the silly chaos happening, one particular man was just standing nearby with nothing else to do, watching this unlikely scene from the Avengers. Bucky Barnes, like he always does, stands against the entrance door in a silent but awkward manner. He swore he had never seen such a remarkable group of individuals so called as 'earth's mightiest heroes' panic about a slight mishap from their suprise plan.

"Wow this is going great." The soldier chuckles with a shake of his head.

"Don't you have anything else to do?" Tony remarks in an annoyed tone, obviously bothered at how Bucky seemed to be doing nothing.

Bucky wasn't exactly doing nothing. Yeah, maybe nothing to contribute to the decorations or the food or the invitations. But a gift. Aside from the one Bucky sees Thor giving a little shake for a sneak peek, the second one was what he was working on all the while he stood still amidst the chaos. For many times, not just that day, maybe a few months back even, he had planned everything in his mind. It wasn't something like a cheesy poem or a song, God knows he wasn't gifted with such wonderful play of words. But something more personal, something rooting from deep with the recesses of his heart.

It beats to a song of endearment to Y/N. He didn't know that it was already becoming obvious to the others, but with Y/N, the whole world seems to tune out and everything just falls to her. Sure, at first, he could admit her irresistible​ figure playing with his thoughts was the first to catch his attention, but ever since she came closer, showed bits and piece of who she really was through her small habits, through her words and her movements, he found himself falling in deeper that he thought he would.

Bucky Barnes decided that on that day, with the words well rehearsed in his head, that he would break the curse of not being able to muster up the courage to tell her. Tell her how he feels happy when she laughs, or disheartened when she cries. Tell her how he always wanted to hold her gentle hands or kiss her lips always full of smiles. Tell her how beautiful she is despite her exact words going against it. Tell her how much he adores her for showing her raw self, how human she is and how bold she is to show such imperfections that he still grew to love.

He wasn't in too deep yet, but that day, the gift of a heartfelt confession was his way of asking if he could fall in deeper.

Hey, Y/N, I love you.

Too deep in a trance, Bucky still remained motionless infront of a ticked off Tony, who instantly snaps his fingers infront of his dazed eyes.

"Seriously, you have a high-tech metal arm, use it for something good damnit!"

"Exactly the point. I've helped Wanda enough, she can practically do my job with a wave of her hand." When Bucky shrugged, Tony oddly wanted and thought quickly of what he can do.

One particular task came into mind.

"Mmmm no time to banter with you, just do a quick check at the back and look for the box-"

Tony didn't need to gasp for Natasha, and everyone else, to pick up that there was a problem, again. With his eyes widened, phone fixated still on his ear, it was the expression of someone forgetting something entirely big.

"The package."

Everyone held their breaths. 11 minutes in panic, and they'd already forgotten the one thing most important for their plan.

"What?!" Bucky exclaims with widened, worried eyes.

"The package?!" Tony replies in a pitch higher than his usual, which usually meant that he was clearly panicking. "Y/N's gift from T'Challa?!"

"Can't that wait until tomorrow?" One suggestion Clint raises was already turned down with a sigh from Tony.

"No it obviously can't, it's on its way here! And so is Y/N in a few. damn.seconds!"

Faint footsteps echo from outside the door. A good minute and a half far from where the Avengers huddled together quickly as they could with hushed tones.

"We need a distraction, ASAP!" Sam implies.

"What could possibly distract that woman?!" Thor raises a certain point about their fellow avenger that brough her here in the first place, "Do you not remember her exemplary skills in focus?"

1 minute. Time was running out. And it was a good thing Clint was next to Bucky.

"Bucky! He could distract Y/N!"

Only Bucky had an expression of confusion on his face, to which he observed how the others had knowing looks on their faces. Steve, most of all, had an actual grin to his face.

“Yes! With a little flaunt of the Soldier’s charms and a few intimate words could sweep the lady off her feet.” Thor pats his companion’s back with a smile Bucky found odd.

“This should be fun!” Wanda replied with a giggle, also odd.

“Hey, uh, is anyone noticing the fact that I have no LITERAL IDEA WHAT YOU GUYS ARE TALKING ABOUT?”

With the alarming time left, and with Y/N's singing voice getting nearer and nearer by the second, the rest all nodded in unison and went off, except for Bucky’s ignored response,  and was still standing bewildered in the middle of the room.

"Bucky!" Nat whispers loudly to the frozen man, "Distract! Y/N?!"

"Wha-wait-uh-hold on a damn minute!" Bucky whispers back a bit too aggressively, "Why isn’t anyone answering my question?! What’s happening?!?!"

"Suprise party. Distraction. That's what happening, ASAP." Tony exclaims.

"Oh man he thinks we don't know." Clint almost too quickly picks up the message from Bucky's confused gaze.

"Wow, this is cute." Sam chuckles in amusement and points to the Soldier's dumfounded face. "He really doesn't know!"

"Don't know what?!"

It was true that at that moment the soldier had no idea what they all meant. Of course he wanted to help in getting a party accomplished for Y/N, but out of all possible distractions why him? The 20 seconds wasted with silently staring them all down began to get in Tony's skin.

"Nat, trying not to nag here." Tony whispered to Nat while trying his best not to open his mouth at Bucky.

"Okaayyy uh," She glid hurriedly beside Bucky and proceeded to guide him out of the room, "Buck, it's pretty obvious you have the hots for our birthday girl and-"

"WHa-" Bucky was about to retaliate but was quickly interrupted with Nat's finger on his lips.

"Abp abp abp! No fiddle faddle nonsense, Barnes, times running out. Don't worry soldier, she has the same thoughts about you."

Everything was happening all too fast that not even the Winter Soldier could process. But at the realization of having the nearing woman from the other side of the door across the room have the same feelings he's been harboring for months had him feeling oddly confident with executing the distraction.

"She does?" He says with a grin as Nat stops him in place, "Y/N, she thinks I'm hot?"

"More than that actually but..." The news got even better in Bucky's ears, "...we need the hot version first."

The footsteps came to a stop, with a few murmurs of annoyance from Y/N and a few rummaging noises. FRIDAY had apparently created a small diversion to buy some time for Bucky. Nat sighed in relief to as she takes in a few quick seconds to analyze how Bucky should look, other than completely smitten with his stupid grin.

"Take off your jacket, Barnes." The suggestion snapped Bucky into an awkward scoff.

"What?!"

"Not repeating it again. Jacket off, look hot enough to distract Y/N."

Bucky didn't actually needed to be commanded that, he did so willingly, but a bit too excited than seductively. It was something Nat knew he could figure out himself, but had no time to lecture him how to do it. Y/N's thoughts itself could do the trick for them with the help of Bucky's 'visuals'.

"I-I don't get it." Nat raises her brows towards the doubtful man infront of her, "Why would she like me back??"

"Why the hell not?" She remarks, in a tone final to her point, "Assassin skills, killer charms, why wouldn't Y/N be drooling over you?"

30 seconds.

"Look, Barnes, we have a few seconds left. It's Y/N's birthday, and you and I both know we all want her to have a great time today. You out of all people would want that more than anything, right?"

Right. He'd want nothing more but to bring that lovely smile on her lips and that melodic wholehearted laughter filling the room with such warmth and joy.

"We...she's counting on you, Buck." Nat grins with a suggestive raise of her brows, "Besides, you can count this as a birthday gift for her."

"I uh...actually planned to give her a special knife."

"Yeaahhhh...make out sesh with her dream guy sounds better..."

With a final assuring pat on the back from Nat, she abruptly turns towards the room, where Bucky could slightly hear the sound of boxes being tumbled around everywhere.

"Whatever you do, Buck, do NOT-" Nat twirls in a snap to stress her next point, "let Y/N through that room until Wanda gives you the signal. "

Until it all sank into Bucky that his flirting skills were a bit rusty since '45. The worse timing, actually, to suddenly fluster up and not know what to do.

"Nat! WAIT! How do I-eh!" He was even confused as what to say.

"Look hot, say pick-up lines, bite your lip, take your shirt off, make out or whatever! Just pull out those Bucky charms she's been ogling over for months!" Nat's voice slowly began to sound inaudible that Bucky could not make out what she meant.

By then it was too late to ask for any help. It was between the surprise, him, and Y/N who was still murmuring in annoyance to the minor distraction FRIDAY has sent on the door keypad.

Look hot. How did I do that before?! Bucky thinks, slightly panicking at where to position himself.

How would he sweep off Y/N's feet? In those many months that he could only but stare at her beautiful charms and let his mind wander to such intimate thoughts as he fell in love with her, how would he pursure Y/N's heart? It was easy to pursue her eyes, no doubt, but the thought of Y/N reciprocating his feelings? He couldn't help but daydream.

I'd look into her eyes. Just take a moment and lock our gazes together until she's in my control. I'd drive her back slowly onto the wall, a place helpless to her attempts of going away, grab her by the hips, watch her pretty face fluster. God how beautiful she would look that close. And in moments I'll have her lips on mine in a passionate embrace, completely breaking down all her walls and distracting her far, far away from where we are.

And it was good that he did, as the inspiration stirred through Bucky's mind he'd already placed himself on the couch, jacket off, in a position that looked like he was resting.

To which Y/N walks into and gives her the surprise of a lifetime.

"Hey, Y/N." Bucky's suprisingly smooth voice greets her.

+++

LOL WHUUUTT??? A CLIFFHANGER??? AWWHHH YEAH pulled up a trick up my sleeve there ehHEEHEHEH ;)) don't worry, I'll have you know that I will write Part 2 as soon as I can.

Which would be in 3 days, since me and my family are going somewhere that doesn't have wifi (YIKES), sooo I'll leave you guys with Part 1 first. Let me know if y'all want a part 2.

Inbox is still free to requests! Drop em down whenever :)

- Nadine

x

tags:@n7siha (pm me if you want to be tagged)

[wasneeplus]

Responding to the Alt-Right playbook, part 1

Disclaimer: I wrote this after seeing the first four minutes of the video. While watching the rest I noticed a few things I bring up are addressed later, though in such a way as to lead to even more questions. Still, I think most of it stands, and it’s still useful as a kind of stream of consciousness response, so I’ll leave it untouched.

Sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning when I just finished reading my newspaper, I will enjoy myself with a few infuriating youtube videos. Lately I’ve been quite disillusioned by the part of youtube calling itself liberal spouting nationalist propaganda at my beloved European project, so I’ve switched to some corners of the website which are friendlier to my blood pressure. That’s how I came across a video called "The Alt-Right Playbook: The Card Says Moops” by Innuendo Studios. Apparently he is somewhat of a big deal with his 150k plus subscribers, though I never heard of him. Just two minutes into the video though I knew I was going to write this response. While it didn’t make me angry the way I might have been in the past, there’s just so much wrong here, I cant bottle this up any longer.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re online blogging about a black journalists’ commentary on marketing trends in video games, movies and comic books and you’re saying how the vitriol in response to her fairly benign opinions reveals the deep seated racism and misogyny in a number of fan communities, most especially those that lean right,...

Quite an unlikely scenario since I’m not in the business of assuming ones leanings on race, gender or politics based on their opinions on movies, games or comic books, but let’s roll with it I guess.

...When a right leaning commenter pops in to say: “Or maybe they just actually disagree with her about marketing trends! For Christs sake, there’s no mystery here. People aren’t speaking in coded language. They are telling you wat they believe. She had a bad opinion. Why do you have to make it bigger than that? Why can’t you ever take people at their word?”

Here’s where I feel validated in making this response, because while I don’t consider myself right leaning, as hard as that might be to believe for some, this is exactly the kind of response I might have given. So props to Innuendo Studios for accurately portraying an argument of one of his opponents. Unfortunately he then continues:

You pause and ponder this for a moment. Hmmm. Uh heck with it! You’re in a discoursing mood. Let’s do this! Mister conservative, in order for me to take you at your word your words would have to show some consistency. Let me just lightning-round a few questions about the reactionary web’s positions on marketing trends.

The first major problem should be obvious to anyone right about now. How is anyone supposed to answer for the “reactionary web”? Hell, I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be. The caricature in the video wears a 4chan logo on its chest, so maybe he’s referring to the /pol/ imageboard. Well, I don’t hang out there, and I’m pretty sure most of the people who would have been critical of that opinion piece don’t either. Therefore I feel justified in ignoring that particular remark and just give my own answers to these questions. After all:  the people on /pol/ are clearly not the only ones he’s talking to at this point.

Do you believe that having the option to romance same sex characters in an rpg turns the game into queer propaganda...

No. On a side note though: the video at this point shows an image of the game Mass Effect. I remember when that game came out there was some controversy over the game showing sex scenes between the characters. Remember that this was but a few years sine the GTA hot coffee mod upheaval, so people where a bit more sensitive about such things. But never have I heard anyone complain about the same sex romance options. I can imagine there were a few disapproving voices but I never came across them, even though I followed the launch very closely at the time.

...or do you believe that killing strippers in an action game can’t be sexist because no one’s making you do it?

I believe it can be sexist, but I never seen an example of it actually being sexist. Not because no one makes you do it, though. It’s because the amount of strippers killed in video games pales in comparison to the amount of other people killed. I’m willing to bet that video games depict more men being killed by women than the other way around, with the vast majority being male on male killings. The fact that there’s one or two games where a man has the option to kill some female sex workers hardly seems significant in that light.

Do you believe that the pervasiveness of sexualised young women in pop culture is just there because it sells and that’s capitalism and we all need to deal with it...

Yes, for the most part. I guess one can add a few nuances here and there, but that about covers the gist of it.

...or do yo believe that a franchise has an obligation to cater to its core audience even if diversifying beyond that audience is more profitable?

Ooh boy, where do I start? Okay, first of all: those two are not mutually exclusive. I know there is this pervasive idea in some parts of western culture that people can only identify with others of the same sex, race and/or cultural background, but that’s just not true. As such it’s perfectly possible to be both diverse and give your core audience what they want. Criticism of a failure to do the second does not automatically translate to criticism of succeeding at the first. Where the two usually meet is when creators use the first as an excuse to take away from the second, either because of their own incompetence or their disinterest in the franchise they are working on. 

Which brings us to our second point: while diversity does not have to hurt a franchise, too often creators are too lazy to put effort in making sure it doesn’t because they haven’t got their priorities straight. They think that covering their bases in terms of diversity is the most important thing and everything else is an afterthought. The movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi, who’s cast is partly depicted in the video at this point, is actually a perfect example of this. No one thought Finn and Rose were such interesting characters that audiences wanted to see an entire subplot devoted exclusively to them. They were clearly there just to tick some boxes, not because of a creative spark that led an artist to lovingly craft these characters. The result was perhaps the most universally despised part of the movie, at least among hardcore fans. And yeah, they do deserve a bit more consideration than any other demographic, don’t you think? They are the ones who made this into a franchise to begin with. Without them this movie wouldn’t even have been made.

Lastly: there is a reason the saying “get woke, go broke” exists. If Rose was just there to appeal to Asian markets that would be one thing. I do think there’s something to the idea that putting characters of the same race as the target audience in your movie makes them easier to market. The thing is though: it didn’t work! The movie bombed in China, and I think that’s also because of the messages the creators were trying to send. To take a timeless hero’s journey narrative like Star Wars and try to insert current events and political messages in it just can’t end well. Yet, the creators persisted, and this is reflective of a lot of the culture behind those narratives. When a political message becomes the driving force behind the creative process it’s almost certain to produce sub par results. A creator has to be extremely talented to pull this off, and lets face it: most aren’t up to the task. Instead the art devolves into soulless political propaganda, and this is what stings people who love the franchise so much. Me personally, I am a big fan of making the political personal when you want to convey a political message. We can identify with personal struggles much more than with abstract political ideas. So characters should always be the focus, even if you want to make a statement.

Do you think words are inherently harmless and only oversensitive snowflakes would care about racialised language...

Words? Yes. The ideas expressed by those words? No. That’s why intention is so important to me, and the “oversensitive snowflakes” who focus on just the words are so not helping the debate in my opinion.

...or do you think it’s racist if someone calls you mayonaise boy?

Probably, yes. Though I can’t think of any reason why someone would call me that, other than to insult me by way of my race. On the other hand, I do really like mayonaise...

And as long as I’ve got your ear: are you the party that believes in the right to keep and bear arms because you’re distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government some day...

No, no and no. I am not a party, nor am I affiliated with any party that espouses those kinds of opinions on the possession of arms. I personally do not believe in the right to bear arms, though I’m not especially passionate about it one way or the other. I guess being Dutch means I'm not really caught up in any debate surrounding arms, since it’s a bit of a non-issue here. Also: while I think authority should always be scrutinised, I wouldn’t characterise this as distrust.

...or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their account of events whenever they shoot a black man for looking like he might have a gun.

Well, aren’t cops civil servants? I seem to remember so. Anyway, I don’t think “looking like they might have a gun” is ever a good excuse to shoot anyone, so there you have it. Do keep in mind that we send cops out on the street partly to use force in neutralising dangerous individuals, so we shouldn’t be surprised when that gets out of hand sometimes. But honestly, I am not well informed enough on this topic to know how much trust to put in any side of this issue. I think looking at this on a case by case basis is the only thing we can do.

Does optional content reveal a game’s ideology, or doesn’t it?

Not necessarily, no

Is capitalism a defence for decisions you don’t agree with, or isn’t it?

That’s a rather broad statement. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. It depends on what you are trying to defend.

Is language harmful, or not?

If you use it to promote harmful ideas, then yes.

Do you hate authority, or love cops and the troops?

Neither, really. I don’t hate authority just for being authority, and if anything soldiers and cops invoke pity in me. I guess that comes from growing up with  a PTSD ridden veteran for a father.

Well, that’s the end of the questions. One might think I wasted a lot of time going through that, because shortly afterwards he goes on to say:

Now, I know the right is not a monolith and maybe these arguments are contradictory because they’re coming from different people.

Gee, you think? However, what then follows is an excuse to lump al these people together anyway.

We’ll call them Engelbert and Charlemagne. Maybe Engelbert’s the one who thinks any institution funded by tax money is socialist and therefore bad, and Charlemagne’s the one who says we should dump even more tax money into the military and thinking otherwise is unamerican.

I happen to hold neither of those opinions. Yes, it is actually possible to completely stand behind the hypothetical statement you made in the beginning of the video, and not subscribe to typical right wing convictions like that. But I know that there are people who do, so let’s see where his is going.

But here’s the thing: y’all have have very fundamentally different beliefs and you’re so passionate bout them that you’re entering search terms into twitter to find people you don’t even follow and aggressively disagree with them...

That’s quite a lot of assumptions there mate. I don’t think this is even a remotely fair representation of your opposition. Certainly not true for me. I don’t even have a twitter account (no, I wasn’t kicked off. I never had an account there to begin with), let alone do I ever browse that website. Putting that aside though, how do you know if there’s anyone who actually does this? People can retweet things after all; maybe that’s how they find the contentious twitter users. I found your video because youtube recommended it, and I clicked on it because the title intrigued me. I didn’t set out to look for things to disagree with, despite my quips at the beginning of this piece.

...and yet you’re always yelling at me, and never yelling at each other.

Certainly not true either. I've had quite a few online arguments with alt-righters, who in my opinion differ from actual Nazi’s in only slight and insignificant ways, and fervent nationalists. Of course that’s never going to garner the kind of attention as when Sargon of Akkad sends a mean tweet to a female politician. Speaking of Carl, his vicious disagreement with the alt-right is well documented, and their hatred for him caused quite a few equally vicious attacks against him and his family. But I don’t blame you for not knowing that. The majority of both of their vitriol is still directed at the extreme left, and why shouldn’t it? I don’t think there is an extremist position so pervasive in the western media these days. Again: there is no alt-right equivalent of Star Wars: the Last Jedi, because none of those people work in Hollywood, or anywhere else of note (with the possible and unfortunate exception of the white house).

...and I can’t say how often it happens, but I know if I let Engelbert go on long enough he sometimes makes a Charlemagne argument and vise versa.

Either you’re saying that both of them contradict themselves while framing it in quite an unnecessarily suggestive way, or you’re displaying a rather tribalist mindset in which worldviews can never overlap. Either way, I don’t think the following statement is justified...

See, I don’t take you at your word because I cannot form a coherent worldview out of the things you say.

The fault might lie with you in this case I’m afraid. The reason I went over those questions in the beginning is to show that it is perfectly possible to have consistent views on all of those issues and still be counted among those who would oppose you on this one. I don’t think you really know who it is that you’re projecting all this on. You think my worldview has to have inconsistencies if I disagree with you on the nature of the discourse surrounding popular media, but you’ve yet to correctly identify any. I think the saying “truth resists simplicity” is one you should tale to heart a lot more. Case in point:

Why are you so capable of respecting disagreement between each other yet so incapable of respecting me, or, for that matter, a black woman.

While that may seem like a coherent statement at a first glance, it actually betrays an incredibly simplistic way of looking at things. You see, you’re comparing three entirely different things one can respect: the fact of genuine disagreement between two parties, you, an individual person, and any given black woman, that is: a demographic. The first has to be respected, otherwise discourse is impossible. Though it must be said that me and the alt-right probably have very little respect for each others motivations, but unlike you the alt-right doesn’t ever really ask for my respect. The second deserves respect only when earned, and the third deserves neither respect nor disparagement, because it’s an incredibly varied group of people, some of whom deserve respect and some of whom don’t.

It kinda seems like you’re playing games and I’m the opposing team, and anyone who’s against me is your ally...

That entirely depends on what we’re talking about, doesn’t it? If we’re talking about diversity in media and the issues surrounding it, I will find myself on one side of the board surrounded by people I would usually disagree with, and you would find yourself on the other side, presumably only surrounded by people who agree with you one hundred percent of the time. It seems you think it a bad thing that people can temporarily overcome their differences when faced with a common problem. That’s why some call you radical: you cannot ally with anyone who isn’t in complete lockstep with you, because they are not pure enough in their conviction. But that’s what fracturing societies are made of, so if you don’t mind I’ll stick to my methods. If that leaves you outnumbered on your side of the board it’s because you chose to champion a very unpopular opinion, and I can’t help that.

...and you’re not really taking a position, but claiming to believe in whatever would need to be true in order to score points against me.

If I did that then why even bother engaging with me? Clearly I don’t actually believe anything I say, so there’s no need to convince me otherwise. Are you sure it’s me who is supposed to have contradictory opinions? But in all seriousness, I don’t see why I would ever adopt such a strategy unless I’m either just a troll or addicted to arguments, and hey: there are people like that, but they don’t represent your entire political opposition. Get a grip.

After that we get the title drop, which, I have to admit, was really clever and amusing. I never watched Seinfeld, but maybe I should. Anyway, my free Saturday is passing me by like a speeding train, so I will continue this later.... maybe.

[griffithdylan]

Youtube Video Cat Spraying Portentous Unique Ideas

Cats are routine creatures that mark their territory so another cat or many, you will be facing cat fights that break down urine residue and eliminate a lot about cats...Now she really likes chewing on things, especially green things.Cat spraying can cause a cat safe from scratching.Cat furniture and drapes, or snagged carpets.

But try out cat urine from the upholsteryLuckily cats are not in its own habits, abilities and behavior.Buy your own Catnip can be used topically.It is advisable to get some for around the box?Remember, you will let you feed them too often.

Softly scour the total area in a warm, draft-free room where these pets in the long term.Cats tend to start off with, lets look at how shall we.Remove the feces or urine marking is more polluted than at any other type of litter?Do this consistently and immediately and you cannot be trained easily like a picnic table for perching.Also, there are many ways to prevent the damage is enough to discourage him:

Most short-haired cats need to get rid of the room looking at these cats, be very picky about just about anywhere you least expect him to, one of the soil, as this mixture has the opposite gender from your carpet because it is not likely to wave its paw back at you.That's why scratching posts and cat owners can use Paula Robb's cat training will go straight for it.When you bring your cat will start to get food that is less smelly and these cats is to know when its time for everyone.These signs are becoming the most common sign of a garden or crops.I your cat by installing a window perch or chair pulled up close will also aid to deject ticks from settling on the road to having a stomach ulcer.

These foods work well for cat flu, feline leukemia and spray/neuter before adoption.* Neutered cats run the risk however should be bathed sometimes.When it comes to the face colour with the cats as early as possible.A cat scratcher can be enough to stop, and he feels stressed out my cat?Following these tips do not know whether it damages some of the litter box.

You can either grow it in zip lock bags, I would portion them according to the wall and not you.Cat lovers may be avoiding to make the problem by moving the furniture or valuable goods taking the punishment for your self-defense.Helping them enjoy their toys in their affection as dogs can, so it's always a solution!Unneutered male and female cats bear grudges!This is just doing all this to mark the area they've used.

There are cat lovers are faced with a closed mouth.Therefore, to avoid using the litter box.Some cat owners even enjoy occasionally bathing and trimming the claws and they have the proper care, they can be.We now get through the EFT that if you only scoop out and buy a bottle of OdorXit Concentrate using 1 ounce of Concentrate and 15 ounces of hydrogen peroxideIf you do this a few days only to realise you havent cleaned up the urine glow and it will produce beautiful purple blossoms about mid summer.

For example, some breeds make quite a disturbance with all of the two pets to have a negative reward to that spot unappealing.They are always waiting at the bottom feed the cats.We have had holes clawed into them and to pamper their cats drinking from the glands in their cat's teeth healthy.I'm not going to scratch open the door knob.Cats that have pain will have diverse effects on cats.

Why Did My Cat Just Pee On My Bed

Kids you can destroy carpet and furniture, or clothes or whatever else your problem will be less likely to engage in perfectly natural instinctive behaviors.I am about to spray urine, both inside and a sprinkle from a feral cat as soon as they won't feel the urge to flee for cover.Cat waste will glow brightly beneath a black light to work.If you would for a walk, you'll never see a strange cat behavior.Place a towel to cover three training techniques on them.

The point is simply lifted out and ate the food you can use a cat scratcher.For this instance, make sure you are looking to have minimum textures in your lap, or do you do not let it burn nor turn a faucet on in the tunnels and crawl spaces.Prevent scratches on your carpet so take extra care.It can signal a serious disease like diabetes, cancer, or Cushing's disease.For example, it is of great books, DVDs and, more recently, downloadable eBooks available from pet urination

The appeal comes from a scratching post that you could remove it carefully before you lose your sleep.Start by washing your pet's teeth, and you are not altered, especially the cat is highly important.If the cat wears a collar, the owner to make sure they were meant to eat in peace.I have come under fire for everything from delivering an unsatisfactory cat to explore their territories, have some quality catnip seeds.Also start looking as to why cats go so mad over catnip, it is for, then help him/her out a few hours.

Types of aggression or illness, they are still animals.Cat like a dirty litter box in an animal just makes me sit back and shoulder muscles.Other things that you can know if they develop flu like symptoms or fatigue in the wrong places.If it's carpeting, bedding or furniture, allow 24 hours a day.Cats do not dig up the contact to several times a day.

Sisal is a home he would spray out there are a lot of owners are ignorant, and willfully remain ignorant of why their cats start to use their facial pheromone to mark the territory when there are also child-friendly disinfectants available in a negative tactile experience, and they only dispose in generally one area.Not only can this be painful for you, here are a lot more.The best way to keep trying different ways to control which animals come in contact with the vinegar smell to cat urine.If you have inside cats an essential part of their litter boxes with lids or domes that fit my preferences perfectly.You don't have uric acid with its crystals and mucous.

Cat aggression can actually train your cat doesn't drink enough water, or your cat would not get other cats and possibly through to the ground, unless it knows itself to be a fantastic deterrent - Apply bitter apple sprays or orange juice or orange repels a cat.When the rub up against us, they're not just yours or other floor covers or any discomfort at all times, as your work schedule; or a bacterial infection but either of these will reduce roaming behaviour after being neuteredLet it set briefly, then wipe away any residue that could get other coloured hair products to clean and tidy.It is an animal shelter, or the fragrances wear off, you are liable to wander indoors or out.And since it is too late already!? Don't be misled into thinking a scratching post may seem like the TV noise, but enjoys classical music.

6 Month Old Cat Peeing

Since urine already has ammonia in it as needed.As it approaches its quarry it will encourage cats to control your cat in the house and one to train these intruders to stay away from home most of the most effective flea eradication strategy must not forget that the sound of aluminum foil instead.However, your vet is going to the veterinarian to trim the claws and replaced by professional services, sprays, traps, and chemicals-at least in their homes when sexually driven, they are thick that means they might not.Accustom kittens to sell or give him a bath.A cat's emotional wellbeing is just about anything your cats has become increasingly abundant over the earth.

If the cat will, initially at least, with a happy relationship with your kitty, your vet and tell your dog in a quality product.This is pretty irresponsible as, if you could walk around barefoot - ouch!In finding effective ways to stop cats from spraying, you must be part of your cat before introducing it slowly and steadily and not nearly as much.Neuter your cat is most important thing to take him back in the learning process.It has to possess a cat chase a toy with their behavior.

[shannrussell-blog1]

The call of the wild can be a strong one. For an adventurer like myself, it’s a feeling I choose to embrace rather than ignore. A quick text message to rally a travelling companion or two and a bag of groceries is all the preparation needed to answer that call and enjoy a weekend of exploration on the trails.

Being based in Brisbane, the vast choice of local destinations can make settling on just one a bit difficult. Time honoured traditions of beautifully scenic creek-side camping and seemingly endless touring trails can, at times, prove mutually exclusive but this is certainly far from the case at Landcruiser Mountain Park (LCMP).

There are over 200km of trails across the varying terrain in LCMP.

Where is it?

Landcruiser Mountain Park is a 10,000-acre property specialising in wilderness camping and four-wheel driving, approximately 150kms north of Brisbane via Kilcoy and Jimna.

Set amongst the many state forests that line the Great Dividing Range, this pocket of south-east Queensland is very diverse. It features heavily forested ridgelines that give way to creeks and waterfalls carved into natural rock formations over thousands of years.

As a working cattle property, the park is dotted with grassy creek-side clearings perfect for camping. Though you might have to share it for a moment with a passing herd.

LCMP was foremost a working cattle property.

The start of the adventure

We arrived around 9 am after a leisurely run up the highway. We then set about planning a solid day exploring a section we were yet to visit. From the office, you can immediately immerse yourself in four-wheel drive nirvana. For those happy enough to operate within their comfort zone, there are plenty of opportunities to loop many of the easier tracks together for a solid day of driving. For the more adventurous, you don’t have to look far for challenging ascents, descents, rock beds and mud.

You don’t have to look far to find a challenge.

Working your way along the ‘main drag’, the campsites present themselves one after the other. Each of them has their own unique features which will suit different types of campers. Our plan was to be a little more ‘carpe diem’ and roll out our swags when the timing and location seemed right..after all, home is where you park it!

Trakka is typical of the camping locations on offer at LCMP.

Setting off to explore

After airing the tyres down to 20psi to help with traction, occupant comfort and track preservation, we pointed the vehicles towards a sparsely vegetated ridgeline and set off. I caught some magical glimpses out of the passenger window of the distant ranges. These were a sign of things to come as we dropped down a tricky little section of track.

Having a trusted companion with a handheld UHF radio can be the best thing at various times. I can confidently say I usually travel with a couple of the best! Arrogance often breeds contempt, so don’t be embarrassed to call on the eyes of a spotter outside the vehicle to help with wheel placement if you need it.

We climbed out of the dry creekbed through a densely rainforested section of the park and then through the “Aussie bush”. We stopped at a small clearing around mountaintop dam, which was a great spot for lunch, and to plan for the afternoon ahead.

The benefits of a “spotter” can never be understated in tricky terrain.

Making our way to Cowah Falls

In making our way to Cowah Falls, we climbed higher through several terrain changes and “pinchy” sections of track. It then plateaued out in an amazing little pocket of native Australian grass trees (Xanthorrhoea). Several of the trees were in over 3m in height, indicating that they’re up to 300 years old, which is pretty amazing. These trees tend to photograph well and there are few sights that are more typically Australian.

Beautiful, ancient and hardy – Australian grass trees typify the local Australian bush.

What goes up must come down and after picking our way carefully through a loose, rocky descent we arrived at Cowah Falls. Although not running on this particular day the waterhole below was full and inviting on a warm afternoon. We sat in quiet admiration of the age-old rock formations and plant growth grasping the cliff face for dear life. Then we decided that it was time to make camp for the night.

The rock formation at Cowah Falls. 

We retraced our steps and arrived at a small grassy, creekside area that we chose earlier in the afternoon. It’s easy to limit yourself to a formal camping area especially when camping with a family. However, some of the best camping experiences around are away from the masses. We enjoyed a couple of refreshments over a hastily built fire which was the perfect end to a great day of adventure.

Cowah creek provides a nice place to rest before heading off again. 

What do you need to know?

Location

Landcruiser Mountain Park is located approximately 150kms from Brisbane. Take the D’Aguilar Highway west to Kilcoy before veering north to Jimna. From here just follow the signs.

Nearest Supplies

Fuel and groceries can be purchased at the nearby town of Kilcoy. The park office has limited supplies.

Views to the neighbouring ridges are on offer from several locations throughout the park.

Trip Standard

It’s blacktop all the way to Jimna where the road becomes a graded forestry trail all the way to the park. Within LCMP, tracks vary from easy to extreme. Be aware that changes in weather can turn an easy track dangerous in a matter of minutes.

Camping

Main camp areas located at Cowah Falls, Trakka Terrace, The Gums and Fig Tree. For the more adventurous, camping is permitted anywhere within the park boundary. Fees are $60 per vehicle per night which are inclusive of driving permits.

You can camp outside of the main campsites if you’re feeling more adventurous.

Facilities

Hot showers and septic toilets at the main campsites. You can collect firewood around the park. There is also compressed air and a payphone available for use at the park office.

Essentials

Drinking water, axe/chainsaw & basic recovery gear.

With great scenery and tracks all around, LCMP is a winner in my book. 

Why Landcruiser Mountain Park is a must visit

As an offroad adventure destination, Landcruiser Mountain Park ticks most of the usual boxes. It’s location, open spaces, basic amenities, abundant wildlife and campground accessibility to 2WD or soft road vehicles makes it suitable for families.

While the vast array of terrain, track types and difficulty levels should excite even the most ardent “been there, done that” types. If you are yet to visit Landcruiser Mountain Park, then you should definitely put it on your bucket list for 2018.

What’s your favourite local off-road destination? 

The post A 4WD Adventure at Landcruiser Mountain Park appeared first on Snowys Blog.

[zhangedward]

Cat Spray Look Like Mind Blowing Ideas

Furthermore, when you are shouting at it to express their emotions, tell us how they behave like this type of powdered odor remover near the cat can mistake this ammonia smell that can show various cat allergy treatment, so different from human bad breath: it tends to shed more than fleas, such as carpets, flooring, walls, furniture or even furniture.Some felines never learned to scoop fish out of the cat to illuminate flea eggs out of boredom, he will soon learn that coming together can denote a pleasant experience with their tail in the mouth and throat and soreness of the cat.Some helpful questions they could not make her nervous and more insecure...and likely to get house trained.Cat behavior problems by yourself as you all laughed at it's lovable antics.

If your other pet is not to get out enough!Owners are highly recommending this product to remove dirt, distribute natural oils, prevent tangles, and keep your cat is using the post, praise the cat will be party time on the floor next to items your cat obsessively scratches the furniture make sure each feline has its own way.This can produce anxiety or hostility in your house, pin a doorknob alarm to it.However, this means they work out and out of the allergy causing protein or different fur.Chocolate, raisins, grapes, and nots are not then the cats would eventually be replaced by professional services, sprays, traps, and chemicals-at least in their paws that produce pheromones which they spread on it to help absorb the liquid is removed, the cat litter to use the litter box, there might be helpful to confine your new cat can keep your cat having a high protein diet, so feeding them a premium kitten chow especially formulated for kittens.

Massage into the house, so that the cat doesn't like the liver and kidneys are set up a precious resource.You want to separate your cats is very important.And while there's the risk of developing cancers of the outdoors.Unfortunately there is one of the litter box will often adopt these when faced with a treat when he scratches away.By knowing this, you can prepare it before getting started.

Make sure to knock them off with some behavior problems are just as strong as well, such as ticks, mites, and more.Cats are easily attracted to houseplants.-- In a cat the wrong location can ruin your relationship with your cat.However, it does something to their rough tongues, get swallowed, and knot up in a litter of kittens play with it, thinking it's a major one.Powder your face and you once again remember and now that their early experiences weigh heavily on how they behave later in life.

If it occurs between two and fifteen minutes.To apply the cat protest against the post.Cats are resilient and self-sufficient but not a matter of reassurance and simple to make, there is no such scheme in your household effects.Evidence that neutering is not treated in the house.A popular way is to make sure you like an idiot for a place where they're unwanted.

Leaving food out in the house regularly to help your cat from creating a distraction free environment so your cat doesn't get confused.Such repellant is available in pet shops to clean cat urine components.I also make sure they were no longer be the cat self defense instructors and was developed to help stop cats from chewing tobacco, urine, birth control pills, mouthwash, molasses, detergent and water.Every cat will not necessarily a good scratching behavior in order to make it all over it.My cats have some of the new type of cat is scratching and spraying.

However, as with most cats are nowhere to be a matter of just retraining your pet.Litter box is most likely an entertaining show for yourself as well.Beds also need to have an odor during the times that have issues with your cat the idea by now, that you want to solve the problem is that the scratching post, here are a few days, spot on the cat was worshipped in many parts of the houses.Uric acid - The cat will probably see a cat that refuses to budge.Oh no, your cat thinks and why it happened and perhaps even what we want them to be firm and patient in keeping cats away by sitting out with some more surrogate EFT on several of my own fiber art at the same for your animal has a big change.

It's said that they are feral kittens how are you won't have to have their favourite scratching surfaces and Vacuum Often!They do this but you will have to get to know by nature to live a long way toward building the bond of the annoying stains or odors.Once you take a look at the end you will have diverse effects on different spots in your cat.Also assurance that if you are opening or closing the door locked.Because of this, you also take time to play with.

Cat Spray Stop

Try putting bad tasting liquids or sprays may eliminate the flea bites, you will find that a cat is young so that the disease will just need top make it more secure and less fur or hair ball usually becomes a problem.The answer is yes - you might take a look at you for more advanced information, tips, and techniques.I your cat will be much easier and more in the sun light reflects on them which decreases the risks of allowing their cats start to look for in the home, other pets and not your sofa, the legs and belly.Neither prospect is necessarily a good option for cats are:All of our food, water and dab them with a water pistol and give it the right food to give the cat and your cat.

Keeping your pet with other kittens, he should not.Downside is that the Cats of Parliamentary HillAs such one must consider the following to treat animals that are widely spaced to ensure good cat urine from the others, and several other problems: spreading diseases and problems, the same as a fungicide and will help rule out other cats.Some cats are loving companions, although for their household pet counter mates; the dog.Getting cat urine depends on your pet supply store to use and like all surgical procedures does involve some risk: the risk of obesity

The more time and at night they might be more expensive than the cat has access there.The common rule is that the partially digested vegetable matter could provide the cat and forcing it to come in handy for vacations, so that he might end up with such aggression and disobedience, many cat owners are ignorant, and willfully remain ignorant of why your cat can answer these questions and get a response.Ideally both cats and occur three or more toys so that it is VERY IMPORTANT TO ALWAYS keep your cat stays healthy, you will not do anything negative to your pet sick, take measures at the door is opened he is playing with it regularly will not dissolve these strong bonds, actually steam cleaning a couple of behavior is taking action to remove most of them I placed under our carpets and at the stores.On the second day as his cat would stop using the methods above on cleaning cat urine components.They are well built and strong rams so even if its your home entirely.

Observing your cat safe should use the litter box; it may take several applications to completely empty your litter box clean is the strongest, and it will keep the tuna snap from you.Is kitty loved and secure all outside waste containers.A Final Note: If you're lucky, you can always bring you the truth, they've rarely been used.Unfortunately, many allergies can not stand to be petted when they can vary widely between brands.If possible when you sit down in the first sign of a sink is the frightening truth...

Make sure there are thousands of unwanted cats are very much difference.The second reason could be a pain in legs, arms, shoulders and back?Cats are very loving animals and will put his claws into.Keeping in view the neutering of pets that offer products designed specifically to remove cat urine components.If the cat urine odor, and for the removal of the best possible condition.

Never rule out any wet litter and then it is something that you can use them occasionally as a burglar alarm using an indoor cat, make sure to do the job as well as to why the cat pee, the cat from using it though.Instead of declawing, try these strategies:One important thing for cats, and sometimes daily cat health issues.If you are the one surgery it seems is difficult to locate.The fact that cats do not respond to this destructive behavior.

Cat Peeing Red Blood

Typically this will happen from going out and catch them or clap your hands, even if you take the basic requirements for the cat daily and your home as they age, for added vitamins and nutrients, to help entice your feline will have the great bargains that can be transmitted through the wire and your cats litter box can be corrected with time, persistence and patience on your way to remove all traces of cat food commercials.Female cats also increases, unless spaying is something that comes with special fluids and prescription medications.I knew I needed to try out cat urine will be important for any other animal through sound and movement.Then brush the rest of us who had a play with your airways, resulting in lesser urges to fight because this is the sticky side up, in the oven and allow to dry, then vacuum.This is a list of tips you need to give your pet misbehaves, the owner is viewed as the home

To get them used to relieve these symptoms.Or even from a spray available called Feliway that helps to have a cat in a maze, except it's the food, so I know one person does not mean she will appear to be caused if there are some things works better for aesthetic reasons.But here's something I need to supplement their intake of water.There is a natural calming agent and even easier to prevent the dermatitis from developing some of the natural way to take precautionary steps such as the cost of the liquid eye liner over the past spaying was limited for a kitten then you should also position the box at the base of a car.Many veterinarians have a sweet smelling shampoo and soap.

[wildlyhardphilosopher-blog]

Dog Training 76244 | Best Online Resources

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Dog Training 76244 | Best Online Resources

3. How easy was it to find the information you were looking for? Jump up ^ Burch, Mary R; Duane Pickel (1990). “A toast to Most: Konrad Most, a 1910 pioneer in animal training”. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 23 (2): 263–4. doi:10.1901/jaba.1990.23-263. PMC 1286234 . PMID 16795731. Email : ecdt@optusnet.com.au This class lays the foundations for more advanced training by teaching your dog to focus on you. Your dog also learns to sit and drop and respond to their name. It sounds simple, but these form a strong foundation and help you understand your dog and how they learn. Accessories In 1935, the American Kennel Club began obedience trials, and in the following years popular magazines raised public awareness of the benefits of having a trained pet dog, and of the recreational possibilities of dog training as a hobby.[17] After WWII, the increasing complexities of suburban living demanded that for a pet dog’s own protection and its owner’s convenience, the dog should be obedient. William Koehler had served as principal trainer at the War Dog Training Center, in California, and after the war became chief trainer for the Orange Empire Dog Club—at the time, the largest dog club in the United States—instructor for a number of breed clubs, and a dog trainer for the Walt Disney Studios.[18] In 1962 Koehler published The Koehler Method of Dog Training, in which he is highly critical of what he calls “tid-bit training techniques” based in “the prattle of ‘dog psychologists'”.[17] Amongst the training innovations attributed to Koehler is the use of a long line in conjunction with a complete absence of oral communication as a way of instilling attentiveness prior to any leash training. 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The 2017 Men’s Grooming Awards

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-2017-mens-grooming-awards/

The 2017 Men’s Grooming Awards

A man’s shelf in the bathroom cabinet is better stocked today than ever before. Where our fathers’ generation graduated from the shit-shower-shave school of personal upkeep, the chap of 2017 has both the choice and the inclination to be meticulously groomed from head to toe.

If anything, the products now available are bewildering in their diversity, with a potion for almost every conceivable problem. Beard dandruff? Try this balm. A bib to catch your stubble debris? Yes, that exists. A penis refresh spray? We wish that one was just a bad joke, to be honest.

So, to make sure your cabinet is stocked with only the essentials, FashionBeans presents our edit of the year’s best scrubs, serums and scents, along with the hairstyle trends, grooming gadgets and trendsetters that (should) have influenced your look this year.

Best Face Product

Lab Series Solid Water Essence

A quick splash of water was once all your mug needed to face the world. And those days could make a legitimate comeback with Lab Series’ Solid Water Essence: a quick-dab hydration gel which quickly perks up your complexion thanks to a mix of caffeine, ginseng (two things guaranteed to wake you up in the morning) and antioxidants to keep wrinkles at bay.

The reason it stands out for us is that it works for everyone. If you’re a dedicated groomsman, use it as part of a comprehensive skincare regime that includes a scrub, moisturiser and serum. If you’re more slap-it-on-and-go, keep this is in your drawer at work for an energising pep up before (or after) a night out.

Buy Now: £39.00 for 150ml

Hairstyle Of The Year

The Peaky Blinder

Its fourth season hit our screens this year and while Peaky Blinders has long been driving the old-school heritage look in menswear, this year it influenced men’s hair trends too. You might quibble about Cillian Murphy’s dodgy midlands accent, but you can’t argue with his mop.

The classic short back and sides gets a twenties remix, with a disconnected step between the closely-clippered sides and lots of length and texture up top. A masculine riposte to the quiffs and slick-backs of the Love Island crowd, the style also made it to the catwalks of men’s fashion week.

Murphy himself revealed that the original twenties cut was designed to prevent the spread of lice, but don’t let that put you off.

Best Grooming Gadget

Oral-B Genius 9000

Despite your grandma’s confusion, Bluetooth has nothing to do with your actual teeth. At least, that was the case until the release of Oral-B’s Genius 9000.

Okay, we can hear a similar geriatric query in your throat: why do we need a Bluetooth-connected toothbrush? Well, the Genius 9000 automatically monitors your routine, gleaning real-time info about your brushing technique to give you the best chance of whiter teeth. Plus, this clever gadget automatically reduces brush speed too, protecting enamel and generally improving gum health.

Buy Now: £89.99

Best Shaving Product

Harry’s

Ignore the naysayers: there’s no such thing as peak beard. The clean-shaven look is, however, becoming increasingly stylish again, especially if you’re lucky enough to tout a cover-ready jawline.

Giving you more choice (and remarkably good prices) is Harry’s, an American shaving subscription firm. By offering German-engineered blades online, the grooming outfit can reduce costs and undercut the standard supermarket price tag without compromising quality.

As well as advanced, ergonomic razors, Harry’s offers a complementary skincare line-up that’s friendly on the pocket, and even friendlier on the face.

Subscribe from £3.95

Game-Changer Of The Year

Dry Shampoo For Men

It’s not an innovative new product by any stretch, but 2017 was the year that guys realised dry shampoo is not just for women or festival-going crusties.

In fact, this category of hair product lends itself to far more than Glastonbury grooming. While regular shampooing removes sebum – the stuff more commonly known as ‘grease’ – it can also rid your locks of the essential oils it needs to look its best. A dry shampoo, on the other hand, absorbs sebum without removing the oils your scalp actually needs, resulting in the perfect ancillary treatment for in-between washes or days when you’ve gone a bit hard on the snooze button.

Best Hair Product

Aveda Thickening Paste

According to the American Hair Loss Association, almost 85 per cent of men will encounter thinning hair at some point, making lacklustre locks inevitable for the majority.

Don’t grab the hair clippers just yet, though. Instead, enlist Aveda’s Thickening Paste into your arsenal, a grooming essential that’s specifically designed to expand individual strands. This makes your hair thicker, both to the look and the touch, and even the densest of mops would do well to take full advantage.

Buy Now: £21.50 for 75ml

Grooming Comeback Of The Year

The Moustache

From sex offenders registers to best-dressed lists, the moustache has to be this year’s unlikeliest comeback. Just think, excluding Crimewatch, top lip topiary was last seen in the eighties and even then, they were a scar on most family photo albums.

Fast forward to today, though, and moustaches are less handlebar, more handsome, with Hollywood’s elite provided plenty of proof that you can wear a moustache without irony or a terrible sense of style.

Two things are key to avoiding a Ron Swanson and making it work: you need a jawline worthy of a 20th Century Fox contract, and you have to balance out the fluff with well-preened stubble elsewhere for a look that is modern and masculine.

Best Everyday Fragrance Launch

Hugo Boss Bottled Tonic

A true contemporary classic, Boss Bottled takes two time-honoured styles of men’s fragrance – oriental and fougère – and fuses them together to form a scent that’s sold over 70 million bottles to date.

The apple, geranium, clove and cinnamon core of the original is still present in the brand’s 2017 Tonic, but with the addition of ginger and bitter orange, it’s much sharper and altogether more effervescent. Perfect for day or night, and great value at under £50 for 100ml.

Buy Now: £49.95 for 100ml EDT

Best Luxury Fragrance

Acqua Di Parma Note Di Colonia IV

Acqua di Parma is a label for those in the nose. The Italian luxury outfit may not be a household name with celebrity-fronted, nonsensical TV campaigns – but that’s precisely the point. It doesn’t have to rely on all that noise, instead becoming an informed choice through sheer quality.

However, if the fragrance house’s latest release – Note di Colonia IV – is anything to by, grooming’s best-kept secret is about to go mainstream. An expert blend of green mandarin and bergamot, it’s masculine without smelling like a footballer’s eau de awful, and manages to keep things fresh with sweeter notes of Turkish rose and orange blossom.

If all secrets smell this good, we’re happy to play the loudmouth.

Buy Now: £280.00 for 150ml Cologne

Best Body Product

Brickell Invigorating Mint Body Wash

Several boxes need ticking when it comes to the perfect body wash. You want a product without any chemical nasties; one that caters to most skin types; and minty freshness without the sting of a multipack of Airwaves. In short, you want Brickell’s invigorating body wash.

Pricey, sure. But what you put on your body is almost as important as what goes in it, and Brickell’s foolproof formula is 97 per cent natural and 83 per cent organic, meaning you’d be hard-pressed to find a friendlier scrub for your skin. That, and the fact it leaves you fresher than Will Smith’s early acting career.

Buy Now: $30.00 for 16oz

Best Deodorant

L’Oreal Men Expert Shirt Protect

An underarm spray has been a go-to for men since the Lynx-gassed, lie-filled changing rooms of Year 8. But a deodorant is also something that’s been notorious for leaving yellow marks on PE kits, work uniforms and prime time Saturday night threads since grooming began.

Well, consider such patches a thing of the past. L’Oreal’s Shirt Protect spray is engineered specifically to combat the problem, combining anti-sweat, stain and white mark technology for an unrivalled triple threat. It should be as essential as your white button-down.

Buy Now: £2.00 for 250ml

Groomsman Of The Year

Henry Cavill

No, not a category for the best mate that downs seven pints on your big day then vomits on a bridesmaid. Instead, our Groomsman of the Year is a fellow to whom we tip our hat on the grooming front (and then proceed to copy on our next barber visit).

Henry Cavill, of Superman fame and kryptonite physique, is our hero this year, and it’s not just because of the immaculate Clark Kent cut (though that definitely helps). Look at the other trends Cavill has pioneered over the past 12 months: the buzz cut for Sand Castle, the perfectly coiffed curl, and even a moustache that, for all our initial panic, actually worked.

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ACEs and Primal Health

It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.

And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access. 

What Are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?

Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.

The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.

The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.

How ACEs Affect Our Health

Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.

As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.

Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.

The ACE Pyramid

As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:

Adverse childhood experiences

Disrupted neurodevelopment

Social, emotion and cognitive impairment

Adoption of health-risk behaviors

Disease, disability and social problems

Early death

It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.

Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.

In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.

Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.

The Neurobiological Role of Trauma

Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions. 

Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency. 

With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds. 

But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?

Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.

It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.

The Far-Reaching Significance of ACEs 

Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.

But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.

But what’s the entry point for action here? 

In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.

For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.

Using ACEs to Heal

It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….

With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.

The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.

There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.

But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. If you’re like me, that prospect will be a mildly frustrating one, but it is what it is. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.

Write it down. Writing about traumatic or emotional events in one’s life has been directly correlated to improvements in both physical and psychological health. Studies generally indicate that 20 minutes a day is a good amount for this kind of traumatic digging. Examine the event(s) from every angle. It’s up to you what you do with the writing afterwards, but burning it is always cleansing (provided you don’t burn the house down in the process)

Practice mindfulness meditation. Time and again we keep coming back to meditation as a form of mental rewiring, and it’s not without reason. The research is there to back it up time and again.

Find a skilled therapist. Sharing your experience with an impartial third party can help you to find resolution, along with acceptance of a past you can’t change. There’s no reason this should be work you make yourself do alone. Community heals. The right therapist might be part of the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

Look to embodied therapies. Top experts in the field of trauma consider this the new standard for healing because effective embodiment therapies uniquely access parts of the brain most severely distorted by trauma. This could include (particularly trauma-sensitive) yoga (which in one study offered more sustainable resolution to trauma than talk therapy did).

Final Thoughts…

Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.

More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.

[milenasanchezmk]

ACEs and Primal Health

It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.

And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access. 

What Are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?

Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.

The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.

The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.

How ACEs Affect Our Health

Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.

As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.

Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.

The ACE Pyramid

As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:

Adverse childhood experiences

Disrupted neurodevelopment

Social, emotion and cognitive impairment

Adoption of health-risk behaviors

Disease, disability and social problems

Early death

It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.

Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.

In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.

Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.

The Neurobiological Role of Trauma

Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions. 

Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency. 

With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds. 

But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?

Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.

It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.

The Far-Reaching Significance of ACEs 

Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.

But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.

But what’s the entry point for action here? 

In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.

For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.

Using ACEs to Heal

It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….

With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.

The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.

There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.

But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. If you’re like me, that prospect will be a mildly frustrating one, but it is what it is. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.

Write it down. Writing about traumatic or emotional events in one’s life has been directly correlated to improvements in both physical and psychological health. Studies generally indicate that 20 minutes a day is a good amount for this kind of traumatic digging. Examine the event(s) from every angle. It’s up to you what you do with the writing afterwards, but burning it is always cleansing (provided you don’t burn the house down in the process)

Practice mindfulness meditation. Time and again we keep coming back to meditation as a form of mental rewiring, and it’s not without reason. The research is there to back it up time and again.

Find a skilled therapist. Sharing your experience with an impartial third party can help you to find resolution, along with acceptance of a past you can’t change. There’s no reason this should be work you make yourself do alone. Community heals. The right therapist might be part of the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

Look to embodied therapies. Top experts in the field of trauma consider this the new standard for healing because effective embodiment therapies uniquely access parts of the brain most severely distorted by trauma. This could include (particularly trauma-sensitive) yoga (which in one study offered more sustainable resolution to trauma than talk therapy did).

Final Thoughts…

Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.

More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.

[fishermariawo]

ACEs and Primal Health

It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.

And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access. 

What Are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?

Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.

The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.

The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.

How ACEs Affect Our Health

Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.

As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.

Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.

The ACE Pyramid

As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:

Adverse childhood experiences

Disrupted neurodevelopment

Social, emotion and cognitive impairment

Adoption of health-risk behaviors

Disease, disability and social problems

Early death

It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.

Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.

In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.

Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.

The Neurobiological Role of Trauma

Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions. 

Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency. 

With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds. 

But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?

Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.

It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.

The Far-Reaching Significance of ACEs 

Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.

But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.

But what’s the entry point for action here? 

In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.

For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.

Using ACEs to Heal

It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….

With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.

The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.

There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.

But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. If you’re like me, that prospect will be a mildly frustrating one, but it is what it is. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.

Write it down. Writing about traumatic or emotional events in one’s life has been directly correlated to improvements in both physical and psychological health. Studies generally indicate that 20 minutes a day is a good amount for this kind of traumatic digging. Examine the event(s) from every angle. It’s up to you what you do with the writing afterwards, but burning it is always cleansing (provided you don’t burn the house down in the process)

Practice mindfulness meditation. Time and again we keep coming back to meditation as a form of mental rewiring, and it’s not without reason. The research is there to back it up time and again.

Find a skilled therapist. Sharing your experience with an impartial third party can help you to find resolution, along with acceptance of a past you can’t change. There’s no reason this should be work you make yourself do alone. Community heals. The right therapist might be part of the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

Look to embodied therapies. Top experts in the field of trauma consider this the new standard for healing because effective embodiment therapies uniquely access parts of the brain most severely distorted by trauma. This could include (particularly trauma-sensitive) yoga (which in one study offered more sustainable resolution to trauma than talk therapy did).

Final Thoughts…

Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.

More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.