Justin's Tumblr

[plumstreet]

WHERE is that poem about that person learning all about their partners hyperfixation before getting dumped the last line is like "love is a stack of books on my nightstand with a bookmark near the end" I need it to feel whole help me please

[cielosky]

NYT Tiny Love Stories, 2/11/2020

A Bookmark Near the End

He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming that we wouldn’t work out long term. He said he loved me but that we had different interests. “What does love mean to you?” I said. “That’s an impossible question,” he replied. I, however, find love to be quite simple. Love is the stack of biographies on my nightstand with a bookmark near the end. — Julia Nicole Camp 

[zephyr-of-death]

how am I supposed to stay sane after reading this smh

[papayajuan2019]

emotions are so fun. even when they make me feel like an ant thrown into a campfire

[prokopetz]

The sticking point with a lot of those guess-your-age questionnaires is that they tend to hugely underestimate how long older technologies can hang on in spaces that have no reason to stay on the consumer treadmill, which means many of the experiences they're name-checking can be a lot more contemporary than they're assuming. Like, have I ever sent or received a fax? Yes, I have – within the past week. Have I ever paid for something with a paper cheque because that's the only form of payment the recipient could accept? Yeah, yesterday.

[hungwy]

People will propose we "cure sleep" before we end the capitalist lifestyle that forces unnatural sleeping habits on us

[wedarkacademia]

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

― Jamie Anderson

[squirrelingbeaver]

Opinion | The Myth of the Spitting Antiwar Protester

Nobody spat on returning Vietnam veterans. So why does the story persist?

Listeners, I speculated, are loath to question the truth of the stories lest aspersion be seemingly cast on the authenticity of the teller. The war in Vietnam was America’s longest war at the time, and its first defeat. The loss to such a small, underdeveloped and outgunned nation was a tough pill for Americans to swallow, many still basking in post-World War II triumphalism. The image of protesters spitting on troops enlivened notions that the military mission had been compromised, even betrayed, by weak-kneed liberalism in Congress and seditious radicalism on college campuses. The spitting stories provided reassuring confirmation that had it not been for those duplicitous fifth-columnists, the Vietnamese would have never beaten us.

[squirrelingbeaver]

What the idea of civilisational ‘collapse’ says about history – Guy D Middleton | Aeon Essays

The idea that the Maya or Easter Islanders experienced an apocalyptic end makes for good television but bad archaeology

States collapsed, civilisations or cultures transformed; people lived through these times and employed their coping strategies – they selectively preserved aspects of their culture and rejected others. Archaeologists, historians and others have a duty to tell the stories of these people, even though the media might find them less satisfactory. And writers who appropriate history for moral purposes need to think carefully about what they are doing and what they are saying – they need to make an effort to get the history as right as possible, rather than dumbing it down to silver-bullet theories.

In The Travels of Persiles and Sigismund (1617), Miguel de Cervantes wrote: ‘Prudent men should judge of future events by what has taken place in the past and what is taking place in the present …’ Looking around us, we can see the trouble we are in, we can see the threats to our overpopulated world, to our overly complex and thus increasingly vulnerable society and way of life. We do not need to make other peoples’ histories into lessons for ourselves. When the evidence for environmentally driven collapses in the past is so weak, and the evidence for contact-era atrocities so strong, it is a wonder that the former is the focus and the lesson, rather than the latter. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves what exactly we should be learning from history.

[squirrelingbeaver]

Britain’s imperial dream-catchers and the truths of empire – Erik Linstrum | Aeon Essays

To help rule its empire, Britain turned to psychoanalysis. But they weren’t willing to hear the truth it told

Every state needs to know about the people it rules. Censuses, property surveys and tax records are familiar and tangible expressions of the state’s need to maintain power by accumulating knowledge. This is not just a matter of tedious bureaucratic record-keeping: especially when confronted with unfamiliar problems, states often turn to cutting-edge technologies and forms of expertise to make sense of the populations under their authority. In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched across the world, psychoanalysis was the novel technique of the moment. In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The results were not what they expected.

[...]

In the end, it is perhaps the British government’s decades-long support for research into unconscious minds that is most revealing. Lacking the mechanisms that register public opinion in democratic societies – elections, protests, press criticism – and confronting immense cultural differences to boot, British imperial rulers fretted over what Africans, Asians and West Indians were thinking. The British sensed their ignorance, and they felt vulnerable, a position that made the tools of psychoanalysis irresistible. The trouble was not that these tools failed on their own terms, but that they failed to tell imperial rulers what they wanted to hear. No matter how many times such experiments as Seligman’s exploded the myth of docile and contented subjects, discovering a more congenial version of the so-called ‘native mind’ remained a fantasy too enticing to pass up.

[squirrelingbeaver]

The fatal flaw of neoliberalism: it's bad economics

The long read: Neoliberalism and its usual prescriptions – always more markets, always less government – are in fact a perversion of mainstream economics

Economists tend to be very good at making maps, but not good enough at choosing the one most suited to the task at hand. When confronted with policy questions of the type our visiting economist faces, too many of them resort to “benchmark” models that favour the laissez-faire approach. Kneejerk solutions and hubris replace the richness and humility of the discussion in the seminar room. John Maynard Keynes once defined economics as the “science of thinking in terms of models, joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant”. Economists typically have trouble with the “art” part.

[squirrelingbeaver]

How Trump walked into Putin’s web

The long read: The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russia’s influence on Trump – and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years

[squirrelingbeaver]

The scientists persuading terrorists to spill their secrets

The long read: Expert interrogators know torture doesn’t work – but until now, nobody could prove it. By analysing hundreds of top-secret interviews with terror suspects, two British scientists have revolutionised the art of extracting the truth

[squirrelingbeaver]

[squirrelingbeaver]

[squirrelingbeaver]

[squirrelingbeaver]

[squirrelingbeaver]

Bolshevism’s New Believers

[squirrelingbeaver]

#ThemToo

To fight sexual harassment in the workpace, we must return to the history of women in the labor movement.

The outpouring of accusations today reminds us that sexual harassment is pervasive and common. But it is more than men doing bad things to women. Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes are not just persons deploying their bodies to keep other persons in their places. As heads of massively rich corporations, they are embodiments of capital, using its power not just against some women, but against all women and all workers.

It is not only unfair to ask women, particularly those in low-status jobs, to speak up or to refuse bad contracts or nondisclosure settlements on their own; it is ineffective. Individuals are sunk without collective support, and women and sexual and gender minorities won’t get security and dignity at work without the solidarity of other workers, including straight, cisgender men.

Yes, women and men both have to speak up against sexual harassment. But there’s only one way to end it: don’t tweet, organize.