WGA just released this in-depth report into the anti-competitive behaviour Disney, Amazon and Netflix have engaged in over the last few years to close their stranglehold on media production. Laying it all out in black and white really brings home the scale of the mercenary evil at work.
Swallowing competitors and absorbing production companies so nothing has to be produced externally:
Some of the highlights:
You’re not imagining it, these services are getting worse. They’re producing less, hosting less, slashing quality, abusing workers, and steadily hiking up their prices on you every year.
STOP PAYING FOR STREAMING SERVICES I’M BEGGING YOU.
according to recent research, brain fog is almost certainly related to microglial activity, the immune response of the brain. this is more or less agnostic to etiology - chemotherapy can trigger it, so can viral infection or the body’s own immune response lingering after either one. it also strongly suggests potential treatments; it is likely that in the next 10 years there will be at least some way of suppressing the brain’s immune response relatively safely, with “safely” being the big caveat. (most ways we know how to suppress microglial activity are either full-spectrum immunosuppressants or pose way too much risk in other ways to be worthwhile.)
the upshot of this is that brain fog has a physical cause and it’s worth reassessing clinical methodologies aimed at treating it as a symptom of depression or disordered thinking, much like chronic fatigue was treated for my entire adult life. (although that’s not going to stop incompetent doctors from trying to make you do yoga and exercise about what amounts to your brain having an allergic reaction, sadly.)
this research is likely the result of mass disability among otherwise young and healthy people after COVID-19. it’s not like brain fog didn’t exist before then, but the rona has had an annoying habit of spotlighting chronic health conditions that millions of people have suffered along through life with largely ignored
also, if you aren’t aware of it, naltrexone is a promising medication for chronic fatigue, metabolizing to a mu opioid receptor agonist in the body and effectively mitigating the mu opioid receptor damage believed to be the cause of most cases of chronic fatigue. it’s one of those “works like magic for some people, doesn’t do anything for others” things, unfortunately, but if you have cfs and haven’t looked into it, you should
Postmodern conservative thinkers are more prevalent than you realize and they’re really frustrating because you think of conservative talking points you think of traditionalism, you assume it represents some genuine belief in something. When someone says that abortion or homosexuality are against God’s will, you assume they believe in God.
But the thing is, this isn’t always the case. Even the OG fascists admitted among themselves that a lot of their rhetoric was utter bullshit. Yes, your Polish Catholic aunt might genuinely be worried about the murder of unborn babies, but the media figures and thought leaders driving that movement often do not. These are generally elites, people with big degrees from the Ivy League or Stanford or Berkeley or whatever. They’ve read the same stuff that, one average, makes most people more hospitable to progressive ideas, and come out on the other side as reactionaries.
A great Russian example is Alexander Dugin. Dugin is educated and charming; I’m working on a dissertation on the emergent Russian gay rights movement and one of the leaders of that movement had a child with Dugin before she came out and is still a strong admirer of him. They met at artsy underground parties in Moscow in the 1980s. Dugin has done the reading, he can talk about poststructuralist philosophy all day. But he has come out the other side saying things like “we can use the fact that truth is relative to strengthen the Russian state and Russian nationalism, to build an empire of traditionalism based on our ability to decide for ourselves what we believe in as factual.” He is not some ignorant rural priest who just really loves God and hates gays and Jews, he is an extremely educated man who took all that information and said how can I use it in service of the most evil, reactionary politics?
There’s also the radical orthodox movement in the Anglican church, who say that because we cannot prove God’s existence and we cannot base our belief on personal revelation or a sense of “talking to God,” all we are left with is ritual and tradition. And then they say that in order to preserve the faith, they must become more invested in that ritual and tradition than ever before. What this amounts to is saying that the church should hate gays, and justifying this not with an earnest belief that God exists and hates gay people, but that accepting gays fundamentally undercuts the faith because it flies in the face of ritual and tradition. As you might imagine, a lot of these dorks want the Anglican church to unify with the Catholics, to be even more traditionaler.
Finally there’s the “intellectual dark web,” your mencius moldbugs, nick lands, and bronze age perverts. They have all received more elite education than you or I ever will, and they have come out of this feeling that there is no objective truth, and because of this they must invent their own truth, and their own truth is fascism. Because that’s what they like best, its what’s comfy for them. They don’t really believe in the “science of the Ancient Greeks” or whatever trad nonsense, but its a comfortable meme for them, a belief in far right values that excites them and makes them feel good and strong.
i’m just thinking abt how many providers i’ve had who heard my story abt psychiatric abuse + immediately individualized it. “oh, you’re so smart + kind+ obviously sane! you didn’t deserve that! i can’t believe they gave you that diagnosis when you’re obviously not like that! they shouldn’t have treated u like that when all you did was xyz! they shouldn’t have assumed you were crazy like that!”
there is always a third person haunting this interaction- the patient who does deserve that, who is “actually” that evilscary diagnosis, who did Have To be treated like that. if i want to soak up the affirmations of these providers, i must be careful to never become this third person. i must affirm myself by setting myself apart from her- i did not deserve to be treated like that because i am not like that.
i reject this. not only was i like that, she + everyone else like that deserve everything i deserve. they are my siblings + my friends + my lovers. i do not need to cut them out of me to believe i deserved better. i refuse to comfort myself through the lens of someone else’s dehumanization. the tragedy is not that psychiatric violence was applied to someone who not insane enough to warrant it. the tragedy is the violence.
thinking about this post again and thinking about how oftentimes this individualization of the abuse functions as reassurance for the provider to try to convince themself that they are not complicit in violence. a lot of providers feel incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable when they are forced to confront that everyone the psych system abuses & incarcerates & harms are also people with complex and valuable lives. Sometimes when providers see you outside of crisis or institutionalization, they are less able to access the false justifications like “it’s for your own good” “danger to yourself and others” and “lack insight into condition.” Instead they turn to avoidance–promising themselves that they are qualified and capable of determining who is “really crazy” and who is not, and telling themselves a story whey they do not have to confront the patients they too have harmed. Individualizing the abuse lets them pretend that they would not have been complicit in this violence, when the reality is that almost anyone who’s worked in the psych system has used coercion and perpetuated harm.
I think a lot about how when @bioethicists and I were institutionalized together, both of us were pretty open about our past history with psych abuse. Providers often reacted with sympathy, support, and shock, validating that what happened to us in past facilities was horrifying and wrong. And yet whenever we tried to connect that to current ways we were being violated and harmed by our confinement, they were confused, shut down conversations, and reacted incredibly negatively to any anger we expressed towards them. They were much more interested in clinging to these lies that allowed them to ignore the very real ethical dilemmas and create this separation between us now and the “third patient”.
Telling these type of lies to themselves about which patients do and don’t deserve harm allows providers to ignore the way that these issues are systematic, and I refuse to let that happen. I refuse to abandon the patient that was me and my friends and my lovers and I refuse to let that happen for the comfort of providers–they must be able to sit with that discomfort of confronting their own complicity, because that discomfort is nothing even close to the harm that psychiatric survivors have lived through.
Guys I found a solution to unfucking the Tumblr dashboard
The previous, and widely popular Dashboard Unfucker script that uses Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey doesn’t work anymore. It’s probably because the script was for Tumblr users getting the godawful Twitter dashboard as a beta experiment, and relied on disabling the flag signaling you were part of the beta, or shuffling features around.
That solution doesn’t work anymore. I tried every version, uninstalled XKit, etcetera. Since Tumblr rolled out the awful Twitter dashboard as a site-wide change, the previous infrastructure the extension relied upon has collapsed.
But fear not! Here’s a new solution:
Install Stylus on Mozilla Firefox. I love Firefox, so I’ll always promote it whenever I can, but there’s also a Chrome extension which I will grudgingly link to.
3. Collapse in a pile of tears because this worked, and you don’t feel like jumping off a cliff looking at the crowded, shitty, Twitter dashboard, I hate you fucking @/staff.
ALT