My Deepest Darkest Fantasy Is That I Collapse On The Street And I Am Rushed To The Hospital. They Perform

if i was 26 and had just woken up from a 70 year suicide-induced coma with no one in the present remembering who i am and instead conflating me with the ever changing image of the role i played in ww2 that now serves as american propaganda and 2 weeks ago i was watching guys get half of their faces blown off and a week after that the love of my life fell off of a moving train with me only being able to watch and then i had to like... deal with a billionaire nepo baby war profiteer calling me an old man and saying there's nothing special about me i would have started killing people. but unfortunately it happened to steve rogers. and he has, like, morals. so

s/o to this skeleton babe from 1936

4 pages into a new book and this is the most autistic paragraph ive ever read

Me: You know how when you were a kid and you’d wish that you’d get sick or injured in a way that would justify why you didn’t live up to your potential?

Everybody, apparently: No?

mother

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

one thing i need you all to realize is that you have to fight like hell for the marginalized people you don’t like. you have to fight for the cringey discourse queer and the misogynistic man of color and the transphobic cis woman and the politically conservative jew and the racist disabled person. you don’t have to like them or agree with them. but if you see them experiencing bigotry and you are a person who claims to be against bigotry, you are obligated to fight for them. you have to fight against bigotry, even if you don’t like the target of that bigotry, because as soon as you let yourself slip, as soon as you allow bigotry on your watch, even if it is directed at the shittiest person you’ve ever met, you’ve now established that in your personal ethos bigotry isn’t wrong, it’s a weapon. and as soon as you’re okay with bigotry being used as a weapon, you have already lost.

happy birthday neil homojosten pretty sure you’re the same age as my mother now

compilation