y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the “brain fully develops at age 25” thing? and the “we only use 10% of our brains” thing? yeah they’re all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them
okay people are doing nuance in the notes about the kernels of truth in neuroscience myths but I really really need you to understand that that is not important here. people don’t believe there are “right-brained” and “left-brained” people because they’ve misunderstood lateralisation of the central nervous system, they believe it because that binary framework was deliberately pushed by people who wanted to define who was logical enough to lead, and surprise surprise, white adult heterosexual men are left-brained. people don’t believe the brain “finishes developing at 25” because they’ve misunderstood life stage differences in neuroplasticity, they believe it because the idea that children, teens, and young adults have inferior brains is a convenient rationalisation for a society that marginalises them. people don’t believe you “only use 10% of your brain” because they misread an fMRI study, they believe it because it’s useful bullshit for everyone from hyperindividualist historical revisionists pushing the great genius concept of scientific progress to hucksters recruiting for cults that will teach you to unlock your latent telekinesis for just $5000 a month. that’s why it’s fucking important to know that many popular science ideas are false and to push back on them loudly and frequently, because they’re not just mildly incorrect, they are often active components of systems of violence.
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While every force available in the world is searching for the 5 people in the oceangate submersible, a boat filled with mostly Syrian and Pakistani refugees sank under still “unknown” circumstances off the coast of Peloponnisos, Greece (with the coast guard present). More than 600 people drowned but guess which of the two is making headlines
people saying that users aren’t being compassionate enough towards the billionaires stuck in the death coffin at the bottom of the ocean and calling us “ghouls” for bringing up the absolute absurdity of the entire situation and it’s like……of course no one ever deserves to die by suffocation or freezing to death and it’s a hope that by some miracle that these people are found and somehow saved. however people are aloud to point out the irony of how our current wealth gap is so high that there are people who are able to spend 250k, an amount that most people don’t see in their entire lives, like it’s a movie ticket. except instead of seeing a movie they are entering a death chamber to the bottom of the ocean so they can gawk at the mass grave of over a thousand people
“the CEO of the company tricked them and he’s the real capitalist villain while the other passengers are blameless” I agree that the CEO (who is also stuck in the submarine with them) is as grimy as they come and cut corners in order to make as much money as possible. that’s a given. but as we are seeing now, most people who have never even stepped foot in the ocean their entire lives could see that this was a disaster waiting to happen. you don’t have to be a maritime expert to see that. the submersible has no emergency beacon, is controlled by an off brand game controller, made from parts from a camp store, navigated by texts from above, is bolted in from the outside, and has a contract that passengers sign that mentions “death” three times on the front page. most people couldn’t be paid to step foot in it - and these people paid 250k to go to the bottom of the ocean in it
once again, no one is relishing at people dying stuck in an essentially gutted out minivan at the bottom of the ocean. especially when one passenger is 19 and the other is a legitimate titanic researcher. but people are allowed to be mad that thousands upon thousands of dollars of taxpayer money and resources are being used to try and literally pluck these people out of the ocean and save them from a grave that they literally helped dig themselves into without a care in the world. they are the 1% who can put themselves in peril as much as they please and spend money and waste resources like it’s water but will always expect to be saved from the brink of death by us regular folk so they can call themselves an “adventurer” at their next luncheon
man call me crazy or whatever but i’m not very thrilled with the fact that the takeaway that all of y'all are getting from the titanic submarine crisis happening right now is
“People able to spend exorbitantly for some tourist trip thing deserve to die a horrific and torturous death via suffocation after spending 96 hours in mounting dread and awareness of that oncoming reality, all inside a 20 foot long windowless iron casket lost at sea”
and how it isn’t
“There is no way in fucking hell that it should be legal to take people into such high-risk environments with zero regulations and shoddy work which almost certainly factored if not is the cause of this crisis to begin with, and the problem isn’t that people will spend lots of money on dumb shit, it’s that there are companies allowed to prey on that with no oversight”
just saw someone advocating for ppl going off their meds so they aren’t reliant on “big pharma” and I’m like. what disease do you have that spontaneously treats itself the moment you feel morally superior to others? I’m dying to know
disabled people relying on a medical system that’s inherently unethical and capitalist and cruel is not an active choice we make by taking each breath
other disabled people deserve to live and they deserve the meds they need to be comfortable and alive, even if those meds patents are currently owned by monstrous billionaires
Fantasy stories should have more “what do you mean you don’t do X” things in compare and contrast of cultures. Like the differences between peoples aren’t the stuff they show off as “These Are Our Culture :)” things, fucking everyone has food and music and folk tales, but the things they’ve always assumed that everyone has, and are baffled to discover that they don’t.
The people who are always barefoot are baffled that humans don’t have a wash basin at their front door where people can wash their feet before stepping inside?? Do they just walk in with their dirty feet? The fuck do you mean you take your shoes off?
Humans don’t have small baby-sized spellbooks for toddlers who just learned to read, so they can safely learn to practice tiny cute and harmless, age-appropriate magic spells before progressing to more mature and demanding spells? What, do they just throw teenagers completely unprepared into the arcane - hold the fuck up, is that why human sorceror mortality is so fucking high?
Dwarves who have always wondered why the entrance to human residences is so fucking big, why do you need to take up such a large area for a door that’s just there to lead downstairs to the underground halls? Are the timber walls really as thick as a human is tall? What for? And once one of them gets invited to a human house to stay and rest, nobody ever fucking believes her: That’s not the entrance, that’s the whole fucking house. 100% of the human house is aboveground, there is no tunnel to the underground levels. They might have a single storage room down there, but the aboveground section is so fucking big because that’s the whole house.
This post was brought to you by: People who butter their bread and who had no idea that there are people who put mayonnaise on their bread, and people who put mayo on their bread and had no idea about people who put butter on their bread discovering that the other kind of people exist.
goblins assuming that other races use magic spells to peel their eggs because they know other races don’t like the shell, finding out abruptly that other races cook the egg too before they peel it.
I do think being a waitress has done one great thing with respect to writing: it has made me understand deeply and fundamentally how many writers are full of shit. It has altered my view of privilege and money and the ways that people complain that mask the fact that in their world, they would never have to do a job that equates to basic manual labor, because their intelligence is worth more than waiting on others. (Side note: Sweetbitter was an overrated waitressing book, Love Me Back is underrated.)
Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I fell in to a social group in New York City with many people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living.
Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
i wish people would normalize being lost in life and just not knowing anything. not knowing what you’re passionate about, where you want to live, what you want to do, where you want to go— or what lies next. as a society, we normalized going to school, finding a passion, getting a job, finding a partner, getting married, having kids, working hard to earn an honest living. but what about when shit just doesn’t go that way? you really just don’t know. and what’s even worse is, you don’t know why you don’t know or even where to start so you feel alone. you feel as though you’re a disappointment to your family. as if you failed in life. but you haven’t, it’s okay, to not know. to be lost. you have your whole life ahead of you to figure things out. patience is a virtue. there is no time limit on life. you don’t need to rush. don’t allow society to fixate the narrative of having all your shit together at a certain age. it isn’t realistic for most. being lost is so much more normal than we think. and i just wish people would be more transparent about it.
Well, you know what I wanna mess around with? The belief that I matter, you know? Regardless of what I do or don’t achieve. Or the belief that we all deserve to be loved whether we’ve been hurt or maybe we’ve hurt somebody else. Or what about the belief of hope? Yeah? That’s what I wanna mess with. Believing that things can get better. That I can get better. That we will get better. To believe in yourself. To believe in one another. Man, that’s fundamental to being alive. And look, if you can do that, if each of you can truly do that… can’t nobody rip that apart.
