Past Rash
If you're not careful in a road rush you can get road rash
those who don’t know history are doomed to duckstack
The year is 2002. Welcome to The Catstack. The internet is made of cats, and all of them are demanding “cheezburger” which sounds absurd unless you've had a good cheezburger in your day, in which case it totally makes sense.
Perhaps more bizarrely, the cats travel in tubes. Like hamsters. And they have webs like spiders. We don't know what cats are. Maybe they're ducks.
Duckstack Health: Brush Your Teeth
Don’t have a toothbrush? Just use your fingers.
We’ve all had those mornings, you go to school or work and your teeth are all out of order. You forgot to brush them today! The molars are laying down sideways, the canines are impacted, and your incisors are soft and depressed, and your precious buckteeth… are more like doeteeth. That’s right, you’ve got toothhead.
Remember to brush your teeth. You want to look your best.
MKULTRA
With enough propaganda, drugs are redundant
Read this section at incomprehensible-to-understand speeds as though it were a side effects disclosure in a TV commercial
Decades ago, there was a trend that greatly worried everyone misnamed “eating disorders”. These were for the most part characterized by a psychotic drive to be skinny, with a talk show circuit for the recovering, seminars in school warning against eating disorders, and cautionary tales amongst every neighborhood.
Teen girls would self induce vomiting, refuse to eat, or go through cycles of bingeing and inducing vomiting— this wasn't some paradise for men, women were actually dying over it. And the root of this was a True Phobia, a compulsive fear of gaining weight, to the point of organ failure and it was very common. Because people talked about it.
That's how women learned to do it.
If you are a right wing neonazi like me you probably know that journalists have basically always been lying scum trying to hurt people, but what you may not know is that they used to have standards. One of these standards involved protocols around suicide reporting- “Never, ever, detail the method of suicide”. This standard went out the window when it became insanely politically and financially profitable to encourage gays into suicide because of how much blackmail leverage you could extract from it, but nevertheless it used to be understood that *talking about suicide promotes it*. By a lot1. Specific reporting of detail increases suicide incidence in listeners by between 3 and 11 times.
With eating disorders like anorexia, you would find women alienated from their families and spiraling into madness and a ton of it was in fact egged on by discord groomers. Women would join groups with names like “girl power!” and get bombarded with pictures of “holocaust-survivor-skinny” women next to pictures talking about how fat they were. It was actually very malicious and it was spearheaded by women. Not men. In this way, it was somewhat like the fashion industry, where all the models and clothes lines are incredibly unattractive and off-putting because they’re all designed to a gay person’s idea of beauty2. Not that these women were actually trying to get other women to be beautiful. They were trying to get the women to kill themselves. Partly as a self-justification thing, partly as a sadism thing, and partly because encouraging peers to self-sabotage is just how neurotic women compete with each other.
Peer pressure is a big deal, even if you’re highly resistant to it like me- all humans, no matter how disagreeable, orient themselves by other humans. And you only know what you see.
But some people are much more susceptible to peer pressure than others, and in the age of the internet there are basically no social safeguards against memetic viruses. Nothing is filtered, nor can it be. We are Indians being introduced to the Measles.
These effects are also utilized, knowingly or unknowingly, by many religions. You can, if you’re inclined and in a social group of similarly inclined people, sort of “work yourself into an emotional lather”, pushing your mind to a nearly hallucinatory state. You can do this in the comfort of your own bedroom if you have anxiety. Just sprinkle a little bit of peer pressure on top. The girls of Salem reported that they actually did feel like witches were hexing them, that “one girl would feel it, and I would just feel it come over me.” Early Latter-Day Saints and modern day charismatics and wiccans all practiced gloassalia, the “babbling in fake-words as evidence of the divine”, though both Joseph Smith and Paul took efforts to corral this phenomena, with Joseph Smith laying down a rule that you should measure any supernatural seeming phenomena by the benchmark of whether you gained actual scientifically applicable knowledge or whether you just had yourself a fever and shouted halleluiah and didn’t come away from it knowing anything new. Not that I don’t believe God couldn’t use something like social contagion to convey true revelation- but you would need to control for confounding variables. You would need checks and balances345. Catholics and Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims all have rituals and rites to push the brain into a certain mind-state. I’m trying to emphasize that nobody is immune.
One of my friends, Cremieux (they don't know we are friends, I just vaguely follow them on twitter) recently documented an odder example of social contagion… Every age has had its share of wholly imaginary mental illness. In our age its transgenderism; a few decades ago it was glass people. You can gain a lot of status in certain circles by being unique, and you can gain a lot of attention from pity. This is why leftist social media profiles always start out by listing multiple mental illnesses, followed by their sexual proclivities. They orient themselves around it, just as I orient myself around the church. It is the most natural thing in the world, it is useful and saves mental energy, it works as an ice breaker and establishes your credentials. As far as social technology goes, identity is nuclear.
And yet it is so clear that so many people are choosing what they orient themselves by exceedingly poorly, with incredible deleterious effects.
The effects of social contagion account for an incredible amount of real world trends, both harmful and benign. Therefore, if you wish to maximize the amount of good you do in the world, you must learn to present. By presenting your best, then those surrounding you will be able to reflect the highest in us, and by choosing our relationships wisely, we can gain talent and fuel beyond our means.
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history
I’ve had it
The toddler told me he “cut his leg off”. He meant he got a little scratch. But by the end of the week from playing outside he has like 50 “little scratches” covering both legs so maybe he was onto something.
We mentioned the baby’s birthday is coming up and the toddler got all excited, and ran up and told grandma. “The Baby’s birthday is coming up the stairs!” Non-maliciously, I hope
We did some yard work. Turned on the chainsaw. The baby instantly started headbanging and rocking out thinking it was music. This is what I get for introducing her to avenged sevenfold 3 minutes after she was born.
toddler propping up a leapfrog keyboard next to my laptop: “I'm working too!”
Speaking of identity crises, our toddler found out another kid in the ward (church) with the same name. “I’m me! No I’m me! No I’m me!” They nearly had a physical altercation until I showed him that he can use his middle and last name to clarify in such dire times as these
The toddler ran in and told us “I burped in bed!” “What does THAT mean” “Nothing!” and then he ran off. Well, it turned out he hadn’t vomited in bed. But he did get sick later, and I explained to him that throwing up is one of the bodies ways of trying to get rid of germs, and he started poking his belly like “is it going to throw up again?”
The lady at the store made a big deal out of giving the kids stickers. “I have stickers! But only if you’ve been reallly good!” She said it playfully but the toddler’s face was immediately crestfallen. It was like a comedy reaction. We assured him he was good.
Ducksnax
Fish
From the linked article: “Suicide cluster is defined as three or more united suicide events in a series in a common space, such as a school or community, and/or in a limited and contiguous time frame, usually 7 to 10 days. It has been estimated that 5% of adolescent suicides occur in clusters, which has been further categorized as a point cluster” 5%? This is, objectively and subjectively speaking, insane.
Men do like skinny women but most men are not attracted to for example visible rib bones. Its a lot more about the areas the fat concentrates in and the ratios, really.
I can’t speak for other religions but for example in the early church you weren’t supposed to speak in glossalia unless you had an interpreter present to fake translate it for you into something everyone could actually take something from.
I say fake translate, but you really can translate real things from just emotions and gestures and tones, and I imagine if you’re in tune you could make someone feel more understood than just listening.
“Glossalia as primitive reflective listening” is a very funny concept