okay. listen. if you ever find yourself falling into a new ideological circle, pay attention. if you notice that youâre among people who define themselves as part of an âin-groupâ with a pre-prepared human âenemyâ to constantly rail againstâif everyone fantasizes about the mental state of these loathsome monsters, if they participate in witch hunts or (perhaps worse) poke bears and court harassment on purpose to comfort each other overâget the fuck out. you havenât been enlightened to some grand conspiracy, there are no evil âenemiesâ or âdegeneratesâ trying to rip apart the fabric of society, and you do not have the moral duty to âenlightenâ anyone to whatever you think the âtruthâ is. itâs neither safe nor normal to spend hours of your day fighting with strangers on the internet
a lot of people wear this shit like a badge of honor, but itâs also not normal to hide your âin-groupâ status as a form of martyrdom, relishing when the âenemyâ slips up around you. itâs comforting in the moment, but in the long run, youâre alienating yourself from the world outside of your bubble. the more you alienate yourself, the more vulnerable and lonely you become, and the harder it is to reject the comfort of belonging to the âin-groupâ
iâm writing this from the perspective of someone who grew up in a cesspool of awful, cult-like rural churchesâwhich is its own situationâbut i see similar shit happening in online communities all the time, both within and 800 miles outside of my own ideological principles. yes, every toxicass radfem i block seems to be trapped in a version of this vicious cycle, but i also see it happening in random queer circles and niche fandom communities. no one is immune, not even me. iâve watched people fall into this shit and never make it out. be careful
When I say "my ADHD wouldn't be a disability if society was structured differently," I don't mean that my physical brain structure/chemistry would somehow change the moment capitalism went away. I mean we as a society could choose to accommodate it to the level we accommodated nearsightedness to the point where most people don't think of it as a disability anymore.
To use this metaphor, imagine if in order to access help for your nearsightedness, you had to endure years of people not believing you're nearsighted because they don't believe anybody is near sighted, and you are just faking it for attention and the privilege of always sitting up front. And if you do manage to get help, you have to go to the eye doctor every 30 days for new glasses because they're not allowed to give you a prescription for longer than that. And the government is creating an artificial scarcity of glasses because they think too many people are lying about needing glasses. And when you try to push through and you make a bunch of mistakes because you can't see, it's all your fault. And because you can sorta see when you squint your eyes really hard, you're expected to do that all the time while keeping up with everybody who can just see well.
Disability is not just about what's going on in your brain and body, it's about societal response to it. Do we believe it even exists as a problem? Do we moralize having the problem? Do we have the ability to accommodate it? Do we follow through on those accommodations without complaint? Or do we throw up further obstacles? This is so much of what separates divergence from disability.
There is hope. I promise. Young people just won their case against the state of Montana. Ecuadoreans braved escalating political violence to vote against oil drilling in the Amazon. Brazilian deforestation is down by enormous amounts since Lula took office. Theyâve invented hydropanels that synthesise pure water from the air. People are farming in solar parks. A ship just launched for its maiden voyage using rigid sails designed to mimic wind turbine blades. EV sales are taking off, and, more crucially, cities are re-assessing their very relationship with the car. By the 2024 Olympics the river Seine will be safe for people to swim in again. More and more people are replacing their gas boilers with heat pumps. Solarpunks are growing crops in their back garden and distributing them to their neighbours. Great tracts of land are being given back to nature. Young people are channelling their energies into meaningful careers. Pilots are leaving the aviation industry. Yes, the world is dark and terrible and full of awful dangers that keep you up at night, but we are a huge movement that grows every day in numbers and power. Your small actions matter. Our collective triumphs are increasing. Things are going to get harder, extreme weather will be more common, but with ingenuity, resilience and crucially, COMMUNITY, we can build an equitable world on this strange, tired old planet. See you in the future.
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said âmight as well see if it works.â I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if youâre a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
jerry was in my elder scrolls online guild, and he's one of the sweetest guys I've ever known. i feel sick every time i come across his image online because it's almost always the exact same baseless derision and shitty implications about him because he's fat and wearing a fedora for a photoshoot. the photoshoot this image is from was leaked from his private facebook. the harassment that he's faced from his memeification is worse than anyone knows.
There's an adhd hack which I wanna describe but it's going to sound sort of fake and sort of like I'm saying "just do the thing" which I'm not.
Basically it can be impossible to start doing the thing, but once you've started it, it's actually fine right? It's just FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to start it, especially because you don't want to do it.
So I've got this way where I start it "without meaning to" a bit like if you were standing on the edge of the cliff and unable to make yourself jump off but... but you can jerk your body violently-- then you're falling and you don't really get a say in the matter any more.
A good example of this is not wanting to make a call. So you'd sit there and plan what you want to rehearse and hit the button when you're ready... or not, because actually you'd put the phone down and run off to do literally anything else.
So instead, I just hit call really fast, with no actual intention to make the call. Oh shit I really don't want to but now it's ringing and oh shit someone picked up and now we're already rolling and it'd be worse to hang up than to just talk--
I do the same thing with timers and work tasks where I've trained my brain to only be 'winning' the 'game' when the 15m timer is running so now if I hit the timer I'm like 'oh shit work started and I'm LOSING' and I'll jump up to do exactly 15 minutes of work... Only now I've already started and I might as well keep going, right?
Turning tasks into "reactions" not "actions"-- And reacting is way easier.
It's kind of setting the "poor impulse control" part of ADHD against the "Procrastination" part and making them fight.
Funniest thing about the Old Testament is how it consistently disparages bronze-age hero type characters crafted by its historical peers and lifts up that saddest patheticest wet little meow meows youve ever seen
would u like this sweet soft boy with curls and long lashes and he's super beautiful and has a really awesome coat and all his brothers are super jealous???
before you ask, the coat has no powers it just looks really pretty and he got it as a gift from his dad <3
also have you heard the legend of the well men? they dug so many wells we made them our patriarchs because hydration is so important. they did other things too I guess but they spent most of their time on maintaining the wells
realized that the group of enemies whom I am commanded to love and pray for includes people driving the opposite direction as me on residential streets with their brights on at 11 p.m.
#jesus.#orpheus and eurydice#as a poem#using a poll#this is probably the greatest exploitation of mediums i have ever seen op#every reader has the chance to become part of the text by voting#not the subtext#the TEXT#and i love me some ephemeral works in concept#you had to be here for this one week#and then the text is locked#(barring any edits to the original post of course)#and i just think that's so beautiful#beauty springs from the simplest things viewed askew#and all you need is a poll that accepts long enough strings (via couchcrusader)
and then THE FINAL RESULT. where âlook behindâ came so so so close to winning, but âi trust that she is thereâ came out ahead by 0.1%. so maybe, maybe, we did it right this time. maybe this time we were able to save her.
Everyone's got lingering congestion this year, so as someone who's no stranger to phlegm, and inherited the folk wisdom of a stage actress (the show must go on!) I share with you my recipe for making things better:
2L water
the juice and rind of one lemon (just dump the juiced rinds in, don't zest them, you maniac)
a small thumb of fresh ginger, sliced in coins
about a dozen cloves, some star anise, peppercorns, and maybe whole cinnamon or allspice or whatever else you like, in a tea ball (except the cinnamon if it doesn't fit, obvs)
good dollop of honey, to taste
Bring the water to a boil then dump in all the stuff. Keep it hot but not boiling â a slow cooker is good for this. Keep this pot on a low heat all day and serve yourself a mug every so often, adding water as necessary. At some point you will need to add a new lemon and some more honey, but the spices can generally carry over two pots if you're drinking it regularly.
The acid helps clear the gunk, ginger is good for the circulation, and clove/aniseed/pepper have some sort of decongestant/soothing properties. Honey is both nice and antiseptic, and apparently is a cough suppressant as well? Anyway, I just got over another run of Covid and this was wasn't 100% effective but it worked better than phenylephrine.
While I'm writing things that I've been intending to write for a while... one of the things that I think that a lot of people who haven't been involved in like... banking or corporate shenaniganry miss about why our economy is its current flavor of total fuckery is the concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders."
"Why does every corporation pursue endless growth?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.
"Why do corporations treat workers the way they do?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.
"Why do corporations make such bass-ackwards decisions about what's 'good for' the company?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.
The legal purpose of a corporation with shareholders -- its only true purpose -- is the generation of revenue/returns for shareholders. Period. That's it. Anything else it does is secondary to that. Sustainability of business, treatment of workers, sustainability and quality of product, those things are functionally and legally second to generating revenue for shareholders. Again, period, end of story. There is no other function of a corporation, and all of its extensive legal privileges exist to allow it to do that.
"But Spider," you might say, "that sounds like corporations only exist in current business in order to extract as much money and value as possible from the people actually doing the work and transfer it up to the people who aren't actually doing the work!"
Yes. You are correct. Thank you for coming with me to that realization. You are incredibly smart and also attractive.
You might also say, "but Spider, is this a legal obligation? Could those running a company be held legally responsible for failing their obligations if they prioritize sustainability or quality of product or care of workers above returns for shareholders?"
Yes! They absolutely can! Isn't that terrifying? Also you look great today, you're terribly clever for thinking about these things. The board and officers of a corporation can be held legally responsible to varying degrees for failing to maximize shareholder value.
And that, my friends, is why corporations do things that don't seem to make any fucking sense, and why 'continuous growth' is valued above literally anything else: because it fucking has to be.
If you're thinking that this doesn't sound like a sustainable economic model, you're not alone. People who are much smarter than both of us, and probably nearly as attractive, have written a proposal for how to change corporate law in order to create a more sensible and sustainable economy. This is one of several proposals, and while I don't agree with all of this stuff, I think that reading it will really help people as a springboard to understanding exactly why our economy is as fucked up as it is, and why just saying 'well then don't pursue eternal growth' isn't going to work -- because right now it legally can't. We'd need to change -- and we can change -- the laws around corporate governance.
Corporations today operate according to a model of corporate governance known as âshareholder primacy.â This theory claims that the purpose
This concept of 'shareholder primacy' and the fiduciary duty to shareholders is one I had to learn when I was getting my securities licenses, and every time I see people confusedly asking why corporations try to grow grow grow in a way that only makes sense if you're a tumor, I sigh and think, 'yeah, fiduciary duty to shareholders.'
(And this is why Emet and I have refused to seek investors for NK -- we might become beholden to make decisions which maximize investor return, and that would get in the way of being able to fully support our people and our values and say the things we started this company to say.)
Anyway, you should read up on these concepts if you're not familiar. It's pretty eye-opening.
Yeah, there's actually such a thing as "Criminal Mismanagement", and while it normally applies to corruption, it can, has, and will be used to say "You made a decision that was good for the public. You made a decision that was good for your workers. You made a decision based in ethics. That is the legal equivalent of stealing from the stakeholders."
Caveat that Henry Ford was a racist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who under no circumstances should be lauded, but the biggest outrage I felt in my corporate law class was reading a case between him and his shareholders where he wanted to simultaenously lower consumer prices and increase wages for his workers (both for corporate power struggle reasons and because he thought it was the right thing to do), and lost.
The main thrust of the holding is, basically, âYou cannot explicitly make business decisions for any reason other than promoting the business. If you do something to promote the business that incidentally benefits other people, thatâs okay, but your only stated reason can be âbecause I think the company will make more money if I do this.ââ
So you can still do things like give money to charity in the companyâs name, but only if you can plausibly say, âOf course I only did that as an advertisement for our company, not because I just wanted to give money to charity or anything!", presumably while stammering and calling them "baka."
Obviously the next question is "but why not just donate a ton of money and then lie and say it's for company reasons?" and the answer we were given was that if too much money (IIRC the rule of thumb we were given was 10% of profits but it's not exact) goes somewhere other than the company, the shareholders have grounds to say that EVEN IF you're doing it for business reasons, it's not a sound/reasonable business practice and they can still sue you.
I want to be clear that this is true of every single corporation with shareholders, at least in the US. Every time a company donates money to build an orphanage or find the cure for cancer or something, there HAS to be a cold, hard, capitalist reason for it (usually generating goodwill for the company, because people are more likely to buy from corporations they perceive as doing good). It doesn't mean that them donating the money is evil â like, the orphans aren't going to care why you built them an orphanage â but that it's never just "I thought that'd be a nice thing to do."
Now consider the effect it would have if you could essentially do anything with your company that you wanted to, but solely for the purpose of making more money, and you are starting to get a bit of why corporate culture is Like That.
Iâm really glad that there are calm, sensible people like you that are able to discuss this, because I couldnât get to the end of this post before I started *shaking with rage* that our economic system has been set up this way.
There are vast swathes of human life that have been crushed under this obligation to maximize profits. Entire lifetimes of potential wellbeing and happiness wrung out of the masses like so much fruit juice for the benefit of a few people who already had more than everyone else.
Iâm really, really glad that there are those who are willing to understand the legal frameworks around our machine for pigs on an intellectual level, because I simply canât see these systems anymore without seeing the incomprehensible amount of blood theyâre soaked in.
Don't get confused - I run on an inexhaustible font of fury as constant, fiery, and pressurized as the Earth's core. I love humanity, and I love people, and the things we do to each other make me so fucking angry.
the older i get the more frustrating i find it how little people recognize or acknowledge it when massive problems start to get solved... i get the concept of focusing on unsolved problems and injustices to keep up the pressure of public opinion, but we should also acknowledge it when great things are accomplished. we just started rolling out the first-ever malaria vaccine which will likely save millions of children's lives. about half a million people die of malaria every year and over half of those deaths are children 5 years old and under. ive seen literally no one i know talking about this huge triumph for humanity
we're also on track to completely restore the ozone layer. we have averted one horrifying environmental catastrophe and we can do it again. our planet is not doomed
Im gonna shill for Marie Kondo again but this is why I find her books (yes, books, the TV show is fun but ultimately misses a lot of the core ideas) so good.
A lot of home org advice fully misses this aspect. Kondo not only acknowledges it, but leans into it. And ultimately this helps motivste me to keep my space tidy - it's really hard to me to keep on the nebulous goal of self-care, but much easier to get up and put things away if I envision my salt and pepper grinders as like, retail workers who are now standing in an empty shop (my dining table) and just wanna go home (the spice rack where they live).
Normie tidying process: that heater should be put away for summer! I mean, I'm not gonna need it
Me: well it's just chilling and also I can't be arsed.
Kondo: that heater has done a good job keeping you warm over winter and now it should get to go have a rest in the cupboard
Me: !! Sabbatical for my heater!! Thank you for your service sir and have a very nice break!
just saw a tiktok or something where the person was saying they did this and they were on a hike and they were like "i managed to get myself to go on this hike because i promised my boots we would go" and its like. OH YEAH. THAT.
When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.
To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as âcrop rotation.â
So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, donât beat yourself up for âquittingâ that project. Give yourself permission to practice âmental crop rotationâ to maintain a healthy brain field.
Because Iâve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once youâre ready to rotate back to that project.
: A crucial part of crop rotation is that the field is let fallow sometimes. You plant whatâs called a âcover cropâ, which is something you donât expect to harvestâ itâs there for its roots to hold the soil in place, and often itâll be whatâs called a nitrogen-fixer, i.e. a plant that can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix it into the soil with its roots (but sometimes it wonât, sometimes itâs really just there to shelter the soil surface), and then youâll till in that cover crop, or let the frost kill it and the stalks lie as mulch, and then youâll rotate productive crops back into that field the next season.Â
Itâs important, though, to understand that during the fallow period, no nutrients are removed from that ground, and nothing is expected of it. Whatever the land grows then, it keeps, and it gets tilled back in or decomposes in place, to return its energy to the earth.
Weâre not allowed, in our current society, to just let our minds be fallow for a bit, to produce nothing for export, to make nothing that can be sold. But itâs part of good land stewardship, to give every field time when it doesnât need to give you anything back.Â
So yes, grow and produce different things from time to time, rotate them around your mind and exercise different mental muscles, take different things from your creative processes, yesâ but also, give yourself a fallow spell now and again, and let the field of your mind grow things for itself to keep, to break down and save for later.Â
Two years of my patreon monthly plants combined - from September 2019 to August 2021. Looking at these together is an amazing reminder of all the wonderful support and enthusiasm my patreon supporters give me. So, anyone whoâs ever supported me on patreon (or my shop!) - you helped me get here. Thank you so much for being apart of this plant filled journey, Iâm extremely thankful and couldnât have done it without you!
