...really, we've not really incorporated it into our understanding of the natural world, either. The closest we got was the late 19th century project to justify the racism we were already doing (or "Social Darwinism", when it's attempting to appear grown-up and respectable).

The way we talk about class is still firmly grounded in 18th and 17th century ideas. An evolutionary perspective would have us thinking about this along multiple generations, across enough spans of time that the individual is incidental - a part contributing to a greater system. On this scale, it doesn't matter how good, how just, how longsighted this or that president or industry titan or """great man""" is, cus soon they'll be dead. Someone else moves in to take their position. It's the structure around them that truly continues, that defines the flow of history.

That kind of thinking is anathema to the US civic tradition. We are discouraged - in schools, in churches, on television, in our art - from such broad considerations. It doesn't matter that statistically most people here die in debt having worked all their lives -- they just didn't do enough willpower! So they must deserve their sorry plight! The Elect, whether chosen by God or the Market (not much of a distinction, for a lot of people here...), are thus equally deserving of their 'success'.

Even our atheists think like this! They've just replaced 'God' with an Operating System. They belittle religion for projecting a familiar patriarchal figure into the great unknowns of the cosmos, then turn around, point to the sky, and say it must be a desktop interface. And non of the underlying assumptions change! The aesthetics and the words are different, but we're still trying to cram a planetary biosphere of billions of people down the throat of a framework that refuses to consider anything bigger than the individual!

(id look up the quote, but it's funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language)

i feel like that's not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I'm starting to think we're just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn't to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it's to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense...)

Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind.

Geopolitically we're still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts -- even when those have been rendered obsolete by our own fucking actions the previous (and first...) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY)

i don't know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of Fahrenheit 451. It's maddening. Like I'm trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there's no outlet for the Insight so it's just hovering there and i'm scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.

stolen from https://conzoop.tumblr.com/post/744316560609525760

but tumblr wants a login for that blog so see it here https://punkitt-is-here.tumblr.com/post/744320980025999360

spam this at the /r/neoliberal dorks if you want

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/10384011

read more: https://www.theonion.com/new-law-requires-snap-recipients-to-balance-food-on-nos-1851278899

Portia is a genus of jumping spider that feeds on other spiders (i.e., they are araneophagic or arachnophagic). They are remarkable for their intelligent hunting behaviour, which suggests that they are capable of learning and problem solving, traits normally attributed to much larger animals.

Intelligence

Portia often hunt in ways that seem intelligent. All members of Portia have instinctive hunting tactics for their most common prey, but can improvise by trial and error against unfamiliar prey or in unfamiliar situations, and then remember the new approach.

They are capable of trying out a behavior to obtain feedback regarding success or failure, and they can plan ahead (as it seems from their detouring behavior).

Portia species can make detours to find the best attack angle against dangerous prey, even when the best detour takes a Portia out of visual contact with the prey, and sometimes the planned route leads to abseiling down a silk thread and biting the prey from behind. Such detours may take up to an hour, and a Portia usually picks the best route even if it needs to walk past an incorrect route.

Nonetheless, they seem to be relatively slow thinkers, as is to be expected since they solve tactical problems by using brains vastly smaller than those of mammalian predators. Portia has a brain significantly smaller than the size of the head of a pin, and it likely has less than 100,000 neurons [!] (for comparison, a mouse brain has about 70 million neurons [!!] and a human brain has 86 billion [!!!]).

Portia can distinguish their own draglines from conspecifics', recognizing self from others, and also discriminate between known and unknown spiders.

Social behavior

Members of the species Portia africana were observed living together and sharing prey.

If a mature Portia male meets a sub-mature female, he will try to cohabitate with her.

P. labiata females can discriminate between the draglines of familiar and unfamiliar individuals of the same species and between their own draglines and those of conspecifics. The ability to recognize individuals is a necessary prerequisite for social behavior.

smort spider

saw some good friends. Lost my marbles, caught them. touched some tree stumps. Looked at a redwood and saw the past looking back at me. took pictures with both types of cameras, talked, listened. Cried shuddered wailed all quietly to myself.

got back this morning heard some news.

i am FUCKING steamed

🎵♪🗒️ new News old, new News old, I've heard this one all before -- this young man skipped spring and went straight to simmer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp8znvfYbow

https://nw-adhd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ADHD-Medication-Information-Sheet

tumblr user mwg-7:

i know vitamin c basically neutralizes adhd meds but lemonade good

tumblr user mwg-7:

Transcript:

Food restrictions: All of the first line medications for the treatment of ADHD are moderately strong bases (pH of 12-13). If they are present in the small bowel at the same time as a weak organic acid (citric acid or ascorbic acid/Vitamin C) the medication forms an insoluble salt and can not be absorbed into the body. You may have swallowed your medication but, [following is underlined in red] if you washed it down with orange juice or a soda, none of the medication actually gets into your blood stream. Therefore, avoid the following foods for an hour before and after your dose. Once you feel the benefits of the medication, you may eat or drink anything you wish.

yea lol

ADHD Medication information sheet

tumblr user brazenautomaton:

I have been struggling

For a long fucking time

with why my adderall was having such uneven effects and varying efficacy

and the weird pattern of what made it work and not work and if it was building up in my system or not

and fucking nobody told me I shouldn’t drink a glass of Kool-Aid to take the pills with

or eat fucking Pop-Tarts or Life cereal

this is the most useful information I have ever received from tubr and it seems to be confirmed by several other places upon searching

so this actually should be spread like wildfire like actually

tumblr user firebirdscratches:

Me reading this realizing tunglr dawt kom gave me more information about my medication than MYDOCTORRRRRSSSSSS MYYYYYYYY FUCKENNNNN DOCTORSSSSS PLURAL MULTIPLE DOCTORSSSSSSSS

https://firebirdscratches.tumblr.com/post/635053584689545216/brazenautomaton-mwg-7-mwg-7-i-know-vitamin-c

ADHD pro tip: Use psychological warfare on yourself.

For example, in order to do long tasks, like folding laundry, I put on the Mario Hat:

The main feature of the Mario hat is that my headset does not fit over it, so when The Bees™ try to put me back in front of the screen, the headset issue forces me to remember why I put the Mario hat on, and back to the task I go

As a bonus, the Mario hat is also a very clear indicator to my housemates that business is getting done, and they have learned not to distract me when I'm wearing the "goofy-ass cosplay hat"

It's not stupid if it works.

https://www.tumblr.com/generaln0m/735218319609757696/adhd-pro-tip-use-psychological-warfare-on

(the website demands a log-in to see posts from this specific blog, so the title of this links to a blog that reblogged it that doesn't require a sign in gosh what a terribly normal website)

"Everyone [in the United States] born after 1945 is a boomer. The only difference is that, over time, precarity increases and technological sophistication also increases."

-- Matt Christman, Hell of Presidents Ep. 10

This is it. This is the one good take on yankeedom's generational politics. The generation we traditionally define as "boomer", people born within the first twenty years after the end of WWII; that generation has far more in common with subsequent generations than any of us do with any generation before. In the broad view of history, we're the same.

The early boomers were the first to attend a nationally standardized schooling system -- what is, by and large, still the same system we have today. The early boomers were the first generation to grow up with television -- with audio/visual mass media dominating not just the public consciousness, but also the early developmental phases of children. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they were probably also the first generation of US citizens where the majority reach adulthood without knowing chronic hunger. Hell, the first generation in which the majority have not seen the unadulterated night sky.

We have all these things in common with them. Getting mad at them for being how they are is an understandable response. But, I also think it's kind of silly. Those first boomers had to navigate all that without the benefit of older adults who had grown up in similar conditions.

https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/737626132079362048/the-trouble-with-the-rise-of-the-youtube-video

Trascript

The trouble with the rise of the YouTube Video Essayist™ is that everybody wants to be the next Defunctland or Hbomberguy, but all the wannabes know is how to be an influencer, so the resulting video essays are always really about themselves. You’ll get a forty-five-minute video with maybe fifteen minutes of actual, topical information padded out with half an hour of tedious theatrics about how hard it was to do research for the video and how nobody wanted to talk to them, and I’m just sitting here like “yeah, dude, it was hard because you don’t know how to perform research, and nobody wanted to talk to you because your behaviour toward your prospective sources amounted to borderline harassment, and that’s how it looks in your own version of events which has clearly been spun for optics – I can’t even imagine how badly you must have gone about this in reality”.