Title is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories". Handle means "storyteller" in Nahuatl. This'll mostly be about pop culture, linguistics, philosophy, history, and other things that interest me, but also about writing.
Isn't it interesting that, while we've heard the completely whackjob "abolish all police, empty all prisons" stance a hundred times over, we've never once heard what these people plan to do with violent criminals?
Like obviously, we all know the reason is that they are all completely delusional and think that they live in a world where crime simply wouldn't happen if everyone held hands and everything was free, but like... I really, honestly, truly want to hear what they think will happen to violent rapists, murderers, terrorists. I've just never heard it.
That and, I'm pretty sure you could bluescreen one of these types if you ask them what they think about Trump. How do you accuse someone of being a felon who deserves to be in jail if you don't believe in policing or jail? But you just know they also hold that belief with no consideration whatsoever as to how it contradicts.
the quiet part they never say out loud is that they want to bring back the concept of ostracism in terms of exile, outlawing in terms of losing your rights, ability to hold property and people being able to do whatever they want as long as it's to an outlaw and to being back lynching
that, or they're so sheltered, privileged and naive that they genuinely can't comprehend that there are actual people out there that will commit crimes for a thrill, sexual gratification, because they don't like being told "no" and to bully others, from the shoplifter stealing a six pack when they have 400 dollars in their billfold to BTK style serial killers
or on the other OTHER hand, they do not actually remove the boot from the necks of society, they want to WEAR the boot
and I'm saying this as someone that's GENERALLY pro prison reform, mind you
I've since watched a few podcasts & videos with people talking about this topic, and I think I have to agree with this take I've heard:
This "abolish prisons" opinion comes from the kind of intersectional feminist / wokeist / generally leftist belief that all crime is caused directly (and, most importantly, solely) by a lack of resources, by poverty, by being in a situation where you have less positive opportunities. That every single criminal on the planet is a victim of something, and was driven to do what they did for some reason or another. If they're a thief, or they got a parking ticket, well, they're in poverty and the system keeps them poor, so they aren't to blame. If they rape or murder, well clearly it's mental illness, and this could have been avoided if they had access to medical help.
With this line of thinking, no criminal ever really has agency, and can never fully be held responsible for their crime, and we can stop crime from happening by simply embracing "real" communism and ensuring that everyone has a house and food and therapy for free forever. Simple as that.
It actually refers to how Exxon, originally Esso, first got big by purchasing a method for converting coal into petroleum from former Imperial German military engineers, after World War One. The dark past comes from their wealth being built upon Prussian tyranny.
Cars: Nobody should have to give up on his dreams and talents because some have deemed him old, replaceable, or irrelevant. The king has to finish his last race.
Cars III: Bye.
Toy Story I/II/III: It doesn't matter how much we're played with, what matters is that we're here for our kid when he needs us, and that we will always have each other. Friendship and loyalty are such a central theme to our story that we've made an entire song about it.
Toy Story IV: Bye.
The rapist was convicted in 2005 and ordered to be deported in 2006. His defense was that it was just a cultural misunderstanding--in Thailand child rape is a normal, healthy thing. The victim and her family agree, and they all wrote letters in support of her child rapist remaining in America.
But now he knows raping kids is not something he is allowed to do in America and for this simple misunderstanding (that the victim is totally ok with now) he was indeed finally deported by ICE this month.
Honestly this is the sort of thing a healthy cultural exchange can prevent. As we finally become more diverse we're going to be experiencing culture for the first time and the transition won't be comfortable...but it is very necessary.
So, let me preface by saying that Trump is, in fact, bad. He's an impulsive egocentric, largely unfit for the responsibilities of his office, he makes tons of short-sighted unforced errors and so on and so forth.
And yet, every piece of information about Minnesota I've read in the past two years has convinced me that America dodged one hell of a bullet with Waltz.
I was ready to say this was deceptively framed or made up, but nope, seems accurate?
From what I can tell, he pled out on the charges to avoid jail time since he was 18 at the time. He was ordered to be deported but Laos didn't have a formal repatriation agreement so... they just didn't? Like, Laos said "we don't accept deportees" and America said "oh, okay" and glumly kicked a rock. That's bonkers that they can just decide not to take their citizens back. And somehow Laos was the one who could decide to do that even though he was born in Thailand to Hmong Laotian parents. I don't know if some of these sources are wrong.
Walz's defenders say that he didn't commit any more crimes afterwards, which I don't find trustworthy, and both they and Vang said he shouldn't be deported because it would ruin the life he's built in America that he knew he shouldn't have been able to because he was supposed to be deported in 2006. I Do Not Like the argument of "well we refused to do what we were supposed to do, so now it's bad if you do it." He admitted to everything, he did it repeatedly over 2 years, he said at the time that it was okay that he molested a 10 year old because in Thailand girls can get married at 12, and said she should be charged too. The fact that he married his victim's sister instantly makes this all much worse, totally discredits her "forgiveness," and makes me distrust the idea that he was "rehabilitated" even more. He literally never faced any consequences for his crime and was clearly in a family and/or community that protected him. The decision to just put him on probation instead of facing any jail time is already awful and corrupt and can't represent anything but a community covering for an abuser.
Then Walz pardoned him so he wouldn't be deported even though he should have been deported in 2006. And he lied about it, claiming it had nothing to do with deportation and he'd never pardon someone just to stop them from being deported, until Vang was deported and he said "you can't do that I pardoned him, how is it keeping anyone safe to deport this guy like we were supposed to for the past 20 years, he built a life in this community that protected and enabled his abuse."
We dodged a bullet with Walz even though it was us dodging into a different bullet with Trump. Minnesota's state government really appears to be the straw man the right paints it as.
Also there's a doctor of family medicine in MN named Tou Sue Vang who is probably not having a great time of it.
In Thailand this rich kid deliberately ran a woman over, and got a slap on the wrist. His family paid people to protest over even that much. Like in case you need a baseline for how fucked up Thailand is.
i just woke up from a dream where i was being interrogated by a bunch of people asking me if “furbies are kosher” firstly…. im not jewish. secondly……..what the fuck
please stop sending me asks pertaining to the kosher status of furbies. i really do not know. this was just a manifestation of my subconscious. im assuming that they are not kosher because furbies aren’t even food. but who knows! ask a rabbi, if you must.
Jew here! Furbies are actually worse than unkosher–they are not permissible as food, even for gentiles. This is because the Torah teaches that it is forbidden for any human to eat the meat of an animal that is still alive, and the Furby cannot die.
Also even if they could die, they walk upon the earth and neither have cloven hooves nor chew cud. So they’re not kosher.
It’s really only ever complicated with bugs and birds, with fish and land vertebrates it’s pretty straightforward. “Scales and visible fins” for fish; “cloven hooves, chews cud” for land vertebrates. Otherwise it’s not kosher.
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone.
William T. Sherman, the Civil War General who did the march to the sea also fought with the US army in the Indian Wars after the Civil War. He is credited with the idea of slaughtering the buffalo as a means to starve the Native Americans and disrupt their communities.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
We are also more likely to die from the consequences of STEM scholars Not knowing enough sociology and history and Art, or from the consequences of Business scholars knowing neither enough science nor enough humanities, than we are to die from the consequences of Humanities Scholars not knowing enough Science, but it is nevertheless important (for Society as a whole working as well as possible, through people being appropriately appreciative of academics as a way to holistic problemsolving, and to prevent fraud and quackery and conspiracy-ideologies), for everyone in a decisionmaking Position and ESPECIALLY for academic researchers and teachers-for-older-youth, to have a functional/adult understanding of the very basic principles of the Things they're NOT an expert in.
Actually the main factor in indigenous deaths from smallpox and other “virgin soil” epidemics was simply not understanding diseases even on the level Early Modern Europe did. Most Native Americans viewed disease as the same thing as a curse. (And then you have the Sioux, whose men traditionally dared each other to wear dead people’s clothes to prove they didn’t fear ghosts. Which is a bad idea, in a smallpox outbreak.)
In fact part of why New Spain is so much more indigenous than New England (though it did also start with a larger population) is that the Spanish had entirely conquered the indigenous. Which meant they could impose quarantines.
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
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