your daughter dreams of a middle-aged woman taking advantage of her and using her whatever way she wants to and then praising her for being a good girl
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, butāgiven the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild foodācould 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 thatās 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 602ā608. 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
Criminal law is so bonkers disconnected from the reality of everyday life that things are crimes that people just Do.
Have you ever had on your person a prescription drug for someone else? Held for them, brought to them, picked up for them? If it was on the controlled substance list, you opened yourself up to a felony.
Ever pulled your siblingās hair? Gave them a nougie? Hit them, tripped them, grabbed something out of their hands? You could have been charged with domestic battery.
Did you play with fire as a kid? Most people do, at least a little. Hope it wasnāt in a place with grass, because burning grasses is a felony here.
Your parents leave you in the car while they went into the store? Felony child neglect, these days.
Ever had a pet die from something that made them lose a lot of weight? I had a client convicted of felony animal abuse resulting in death even though the only veterinarian witness testified he didnāt know what caused the animalās death and did not do a necropsy.
Ever thrown something at a car? Empty soda bottle, snowball, water balloon? Felony missile at occupied vehicle.
People can be convicted of brandishing a firearm for having it in a holster. For concealed carry of a firearm if itās on the other side of their body from an officer observing (and therefore āhiddenā). Got a knife in your pocket or a brass knuckle keyring self defense device? Thatās a concealed weapon.
Did you know that child protective services safety plans are sometimes taken out as protective orders? My client didnāt, when she went to try to buy a firearm to defend herself against an abusive ex. She was under a CPS protective order to not have the ex around her children. Charged with felony fraud in firearm affidavit: attempting to buy a gun while under a protective order.
Had a kid convicted of arson for burning some variant of nerf darts in his room and not even trying to set anything else on fire.
I have seen convictions and charges for everything on this list.
And always remember, almost half (45%) of people are in prison for probation or parole violations, huge swathes of that number for doing things that would be legal and fine for you and me but are not fine because theyāre on probation.
This is why overpolicing matters: because normal shit gets regularly criminalized for certain populations.
Forgot a big one! Have you ever shared painkillers or anti-anxiety meds or other controlled substances (obtained with a prescription) with other family members?
That is in fact drug dealing. The defense to it is āaccommodationā ā as in, I was accommodating someone, not dealing for profit ā and accommodation, uh, slightly reduces how bad of a felony it is and does nothing else.
The person who is accommodated also has committed felony possession of controlled substance.
This is why people with Adderall prescriptions only use the original pill bottle. Because they could get charged with a felony at any point if they donāt, just because an officer thinks itās not theirs.
I work with kids who are on probation and a big one for then is about 'affiliating with known gang members.' Which is difficult to manage when you've been placed in a school for expelled students - many of whom are on probation for gang-related charges. Or...hey...not sure how a kid can avoid associating with gang members when their neighbors and uncles and siblings and parents whom they live with are also gang members. What precisely is a teen supposed to do when their mom is the one driving them around town at night to do shit?
I had a student get arrested and incarcerated for months because his probation officer found a bag of thc candy in his room. We're in California; he shares a room with an older brother. Everyone in that house uses marijuana. And now this kid is shouldering all the blame and guilt for that.
I had a student get arrested for talking back and being 'disrespectful' to his probation officer. An angry, traumatized teenager shouted at his P.O. and the result was him getting hauled away from school in cuffs.
Two students at my school got into a mutual fight - no one was injured. One was on probation and one wasn't. The one not on probation was suspended for a couple of days, and when he returned he's enrolled in our anger managment group. The one on probation was hauled away in cuffs and now he will spend Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas in juvenile hall.
I dont know what I'm concluding with all this except, yeah...so many people get labeled as 'criminals' as kids and it is damn near impossible to shake off that label once it's been assigned. The system we have is horrifyingly unjust.
Happy Pride Month everyone! Remember 4 months ago when the CEO of this platform harassed and chased a trans woman off this website just for posting her transition timeline, then chased her to other social media platforms to continue harassing her, and threatened to call the FBI if she continued disputing the multiple dubious terminations of her blogs that did not violate tumblr's terms of service in any way? And despite tumblr staff insisting that the CEO was acting against their interests, the broad transmisogyny evident in the site's culture and moderation policy has still not been adequately addressed?
Remember that staff is continuing to nuke the blogs of trans women even after all of this. Remember this post when they call this site the queerest place on the internet again this month
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is issuing warning letters to 12 manufacturers and retailers for illegal marketing of breast binders to children for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria. Breast binders are Class 1 medical devices used for purposes such as assistance in recovery from cancer-related mastectomy. The warning letters will formally notify the companies of their significant regulatory violations and how they should take prompt corrective action.
āIllegal marketing of these products for children is alarming, and the FDA will take further enforcement action such as import alerts, seizures, and injunctions if it continues,ā said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H.
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