my friend just told me that there's a secret second dashboard that solely contains posts from people you've turned on post notifications for, and when i click the link in the messages it opens it within the tumblr app, so the tumblr app also has a secret second dashboard for post notification blogs, and the only way to access it is to open the link for it within the app.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
See there’s three problems with the “look at how many people in prehistory died to interpersonal violence versus other causes”. (Also the claim that humans are unique in their capacity for intraspecies violence is hilariously wrong, but that’s not relevant.)
1) It’s actually really hard to do a post mortem on bodies that old. Did this guy fall and hit his head, or was his head bashed in with a rock? Maybe something stepped on him AFTER he was dead. Who knows, we only have a shoulder and a leg.This is not to knock the work of archaeology, which can deduce incredible amounts of information from bodies, but sometimes there’s simply not enough evidence.
2) You’re much more likely to find a mass graveyard of fifty soldiers than you are to find thousands of smaller skeletons scattered throughout who died of other causes. Mass casualty events and the mass graves they create skew the perception.
3) Place is important. There are places where over half the bodies died from weaponry, and places where none of them did. Was there a war here? A famine driving people to desperation? An easy abundance that promoted a peaceful culture? Humanity’s natural inclination towards violence or peace often proves inferior to the influence of its material conditions.
All in all I find “Is humanity naturally inclined towards violence?” To be a nebulous question compared to the far more relevant “What are the factors that cause humans to turn violent, and how can we mitigate those?”
The most recent Android update making it impossible to actually disable any AI features no matter what you do is surely a sign that this technology is the future and about to take off and make everyone SOOOOO much money that all the nay-sayers will be sobbing about how they were fools who should have listened and invested. Everyone knows you have a winning product if you have to uh *checks notes* trick and/or force people to use it against their will. Great job, everyone!
You have to turn AI on to turn any of the features off and that doesn't even work, I cannot make the "now brief" thing go away no matter what settings I try, and dismissing it just makes it pop up again the next time I unlock my phone.
"AI is the future! Soon everyone will use it for everything, it's just that helpful!!" Hmm, idk mate, if that's true then why are you desperately trying to make using it mandatory?
if your auto-refill is not on time for whatever reason and you're low, or sooner to pick-up is easier than later, but you think "Oh i'll be fine without meds for a few days!!"
“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era.
“I'd like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”
I had the exact same experience the second time I looked at this picture as the first time. I was looking like "what is this green line? Like suddenly everything is OK? It's not. Racists are still trying to push us back to 1619. Nothing has been fixed. We still need to fight. Hard!
Another point that reminds me of my privilege in this world is when I think about the fact that we sell the cure for tuberculosis to people to give to their dogs for a UTI. Millions of people literally die every year because they can't access this medication and I'm giving it to people to shove down their dogs' throats to make them stop peeing in the house. It's one of the more expensive antibiotics and people always whine about the price but then it's not their daughter they have to watch slowly suffocate as bacteria turns her lungs into swiss cheese. It's not their father that coughs and coughs and coughs until he's spitting up blood.
The deadliest infectious disease in human history is cured by the same packet of chewable tabs individually packed in foil. It comes in beef flavor so your dog won't resist taking its meds as much. It's like a hundred bucks for 30 tablets on pretty much any pet pharmacy.
It makes me think about medicine scarcity and how it's all fake in order to get enough capital that you can have individuals with higher net worth than entire countries. And in the mean time, hundreds of millions of people are dead because they don't drive the bottom line.
I watched some videos by that guy who set up a fake ICE hotline to get people to snitch on members of their community. Not only is this very real and useful praxis- he's preventing these ghouls from reaching the real ICE- he also handles the calls in a really amazing way.
For the most part, he doesn't make accusations or insults people, he just repeats back the appalling shit they're telling him. And they get fucking furious. The example that went viral was him fielding a call from a kindergarten teacher who wanted to report one of her student's parents.
This absolutely disgusting piece of shit thought that the parents were "illegals" who were "taking up resources" because they weren't born in the US. The child was a US citizen because he was born here, but she wanted the "ICE" agent to "look into it."
So this dude just starts repeating stuff back like "so you want me to load the parents of the 5-year-old child you teach into a van and deport them, right?" and this bitch has the gall to say "you make it sound terrible 😅" in a self-conscious way. And then when he finally makes a more direct insult by nonchalantly saying that the 5-year-old "must be a major threat to national security," she demands to speak to his supervisor (which he agrees to and then makes no effort to change his voice for lmao).
This is far from the only call where the whole "repeat their rhetoric back to them" tactic pisses the caller off, too. As rotten, immoral, and disgusting as these ghouls are, I believe there's a tiny part of them that is aware of how fucked up their beliefs and behavior are. Being forced to confront that leads to painful cognitive dissonance and they'd rather lash out at the person who criticized them than look inward and do some self-reflection. Forcing people to confront their own cognitive dissonance of "I'm a good person" clashing with "I have objectively gross and harmful beliefs" is useful, even if it will never go anywhere.
Something that also got me was how the teacher kept looking for OP to soothe and assuage her ego/conscience and got progressively more agitated when he wouldn’t. This is someone who desperately needs to think she’s a good person who is doing good things when what she’s doing is objectively heinous.
She thought she was in the right because she was trying to tear apart this family in a “polite” and indirect way. She’s not the one holding a gun and herding people into an unmarked van, after all. The fact that her call would have directly led to that outcome doesn’t register as culpability to her until OP makes her connect the dots. THAT’S why she got upset, because she was forced to acknowledge the blood on her hands.
honest to god we've got to start naming the elderly as a vulnerable group & calling their disabilities, disabilities. we sugarcoat and distance these things by only calling them "elderly," "old & frail," etc. most of them are disabled.
too many people completely separate disability from themselves in their mind. it's something that happens to other people. other sad people i don't want to think about. are they really even people, it's too much to bear thinking about that happening to a person... those background characters over there. it would never be me, i can't cope with thinking about that possibility.
this mass denialism of the fragility of the human body (YOUR human body) has created a whole category separate from the disabled - the "elderly." since anyone can join it if they live long enough.. no they can't be disabled. that's scary, and worse it's political. so they are just "old." so what they lost their hearing, their mobility, their heart function? that's just how it goes for old people. as if that's not a person as real as you. as if you wouldn't be devastated if that happened to you today (and it can btw). as if you won't be when it's your turn to be old, and disabled.
simultaneously the disabled are dehumanized as not people, and the elderly are dehumanized as not disabled. so the illusion of disability as separate can be upheld.
My grandparents lived to 98 and 103. Read that again— 98 and 103. My grandmother died 5 months ago and was born in 1923.
She was extremely wealthy. My grandfather left her millions. She paid about 13,000 a month for her care.
And her nurses abused her. She could do nothing. She could not speak for herself, feed herself, clothe herself, and the humiliation they made her endure was disgusting. When she tried to express discomfort, they gave her drugs to “keep her calm” (keep their shift easy). We fought like HELL to hold that fucking place accountable. The only reason we were aware is because we hired a private nurse on her behalf, too.
The elderly are a massive, extremely vulnerable, and disabled group. You cannot leave them out of your advocacy, you cannot leave them out of the conversation. “They’re loud, they smell, they’re opinionated, they’re rude, they make me uncomfortable”. I don’t care. I don’t care! They need your advocacy too! I want you to think, if my grandmother— who was in the best retirement home she could afford, with a personally hired third-party nurse to step in where the other carers failed, had such abhorrent care… what about everyone else? What about all the elderly who don’t have a support system?
the point of outlawing queerness is not to erradicate queerness, it's to eraddicate queers and i really need you guys to understand the difference there
