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ok but give me one good reason why you wouldn’t date Kermit the frog besides that he is a puppet and a frog

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i feel like a failure im gonna [remembers that outright admitting to suicidal ideation doesn’t cohere with the rational, unaffected persona i’ve so painstakingly cultivated for myself] infiltrate the world’s most secure prison in the center of a volcano, surrounded on all sides by a boiling lake, from which no one has ever escaped previously, with no escape plan in mind, on the slight chance that my dad was taken there as a prisoner of war.

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oh I would LOVE to see your hypothetical rework of Amon's concept because currently it's so incoherent & nonsensical. while we're on the topic, what are your thoughts on like-- the tlok writers originally saying that they wanted asami to be an equalist? obviously the entire equalist movement is entirely ridiculous in the context of the show's world, (I know you've already talked about the shallow politics of the show in depth) so I just don't know how that could have ever worked??

oh, yes. well. I think book 1 is in many ways the most unserious & politically incoherent season of lok (despite the baffling implications of book 2, which I nonetheless maintain could be more easily salvaged & reworked) so this is a tall order.. the thing about amon is that positioning benders vs nonbenders as coherent social (let alone) economic classes makes no sense in the context of the world established by atla OR lok. they don’t depict either “benders” or “nonbenders,” abstractly, being materially oppressed. while firebenders are advantaged within the fire nation’s imperialist paradigm, airbenders, waterbenders, and earthbenders are in turn violently subjugated and actively exterminated. it’s not a relationship of bender vs nonbender in a general sense, but rather of colonial exploitation. and even if you argued that in the 70 years in between atla and lok a eugenicist logic of Bending Supremacy more broadly developed globally, that is not actually what is depicted by lok. industrialism actually advantages wealthy nonbenders and working class benders are further exploited by being forced to use their abilities in dangerous working conditions. again because the material conditions of class take precedent; bending power is contingent on labor power, if you will. (sorry i recognize that doing marxist analysis of the bad nickelodeon show sounds inherently ridiculous but what is this website for if not. this.) so amon’s platform doesn’t even gesture to a coherent ideological framework. you could argue that he’s scapegoating an exploited population, but since “benders” don’t really constitute a coherent social class, it sort of seems like his entire platform is just “benders have cool abilities that we do not which is kind of annoying if you think about it..” which is true in an emotional sense (i would certainly be pissed off if a sizable chunk of the population had telekinetic elemental powers and i did not!) but as a political figure it’s still rather unclear what his motivation is. besides daddy issues i guess. idk. so to “fix” him it really depends on which ideology you actually want to promote thematically, because you could very easily rework him to be a communist bogeyman (the baseless cultural revolution signifiers are already. there) but you could also easily rework him into a fascist demagogue who scapegoats vulnerable populations as a means of gaining broad populist appeal among the entrenched neocolonial class of republic city (you know. assuming they actually explored that. lol). so like obviously in the LoK That Lives In My Head That Is Actually Good it’s not reactionary bullshit, but what’s funny to me is that they didn’t even make him a communist. like they so easily could’ve. but they didn’t actually have enough of an understanding of what communism is besides ohhh scary red violent revolutionaries to actually even critique it. which is pretty funny actually. you kind of have to laugh!

anyway, as for asami, she’s basically just squandered potential: the character. making her morally ambiguous wouldn’t have necessarily made her more interesting in this regard, but i do wish they had actually teased out the implications of her relationship to her father more because that is very obviously the central conflict that drives her character, and it’s so painfully underexplored. like they had the potential to do something really interesting with asami as an extension of how they depict paternal abuse in atla and an interrogation of the azula figure in particular as that father/daughter codependency is actively resisted and what that means for asami going forward. but while lok constantly hints at asami having a rich inner world, they never actually bother to explore it with any sort of depth. so she basically just comes across as morally irreproachable (despite the many unsavory implications of her umm. entire career??) and downright angelic. asami can do no wrong. and don’t think about that time her father tried to kill her for defying his will. don’t consider the implications of attempted filicide beyond bolin calling hiroshi a “horrible father.” like yes… AND??? we spend 3 seasons exploring the impact of ozai’s abuse on zuko’s tormented psyche, but asami is essentially a background character whose trauma is only ever gestured at despite ostensibly being a primary player… gotta make room for those scenery-chewing wackos!! am i right??? ugh. whatever. it’s fine. i don’t even care about it. i don’t care . it’s FINEEE

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not aromantic but I believe in their beliefs.

"there's no platonic explanation for this" try harder bucko

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are you still working in archeology? working on anything interesting now?

Actually...No. I left archaeology in 2017 for several reasons, but the biggest reason was that I had the opportunity to move back to China, where I had spent time in high school. I LOVED living there the first time, and I had always wanted to go back, so when I got an offer to teach in China...I took it. And after a certain virus eliminated my job, I moved back to the US and stayed in education. Went to graduate school for it.

Now I work in an elementary education program, I have fancy letters after my name, and I am more connected to Judaism than I ever have been. I'm married to my best friend and it rules. I just finished an original manuscript. My life has settled into a space that feels really good right now.

And, frankly, it's all y'all's fault. Y'all asking such weird and interesting questions and giving me the space to wax poetic and make the information accessible and all that. Y'all being like, "wow you're so good at explaining and teaching things!" Y'all were the reason why, when teaching presented itself as a path, I thought that maybe it would be right for me. And damn it, it was.

Do I still keep up with research? Yes. Do I still receive journals? Yes. Did I participate in a dig over the summer which was completely unrelated to my previous expertise? Absolutely. But would I go back? No. I don't think I would. I am finding immense pleasure in getting the next generation turned on to archaeology and civic engagement.

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#shared life experience

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ursula k le guin: if confronted directly with the knowledge that society requires suffering to be maintained, would you be capable or willing to abandon the structure and safety for uncertainty, strife, deprivation?

strange and inscrutable people who claim to know how to read: i would simply solve the problem

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The psychiatrist who wrote the criteria for narcissism just made an extremely important point about what’s wrong with diagnosing Trump with mental disorders

Dr. Allen Frances says in speculating about Trump’s mental health, we are doing a disservice to those who do suffer from mental illness. In a series of tweets, he explained why he doesn’t think Trump is a narcissist — and how harmful it can be for us to keep assuming that he is.

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comic books are good to get into if you really like to complain about everything all of the time

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Was skimming through some Dixon era BoP for no particular reason and came across a scene where 3 DIFFERENT MEN (Dick Grayson, Ted Kord and Jason Bard) all show up to Babs' door at almost exactly the same time bc they're all in love with her.

Birds of Prey (1999) #19

Which is, A) really funny on its own and B) actually extremely based from a representational view. Oracle was important as disability rep in comics for a lot of reasons, one of which being that she got mad bitches in her wheelchair. She had too much swag and they had to kill her

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To YOU it’s bad writing. To ME it’s a very nuanced piece of work that explores subtle intricacies without outright saying it. And also it’s bad writing

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‘is stephcass incest?’ i’m putting the term found family on a shelf forever

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Spring of 2016 is where the Arrowverse made their fatal mistake

Flash s2 finale has Zoom attempting to destroy every earth in the multiverse except our main one. Okay so! Stakes! But at least our earth is safe!

WRONG. This same week our earth is also gonna be destroyed in the Arrow s4 finale by every nuclear missile

They just can’t do anything after this. They wrote themselves into this corner too early. They wrote two concurrent finales where literally all of existence was going to be destroyed. How the fuck do you top this in next year’s finale. You can’t.

this tweet is ruining my life rn

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FIBER ARTISTS, I want to know what yall do the most so let’s do a demographic poll

I know we are all victims of the fiber art rabbit hole and nearly all of us dabble in more than one craft, so please vote for your MAIN one, the one you do the most, the one you can do with your eyes closed, and maybe share in the tag what else you do! I hope I covered most of the crafts.

REBLOG for sample size!

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The Amazing Spider-Man #148 (1975)

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I've been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, "Eugenics" is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it's not nearly dirty enough.

Here's a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn't about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren't leading with, "My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People."

The reason that's important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) "uncomfortably similar to eugenics"--- ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.

There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.

Here is an Internet Archive link to "Heredity in relation to eugenics," a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.

I'm afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport's word choices may provide a "red flag" to the reader: he refers to human babies as a "valuable crop," to marriage between people as "mating." The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport's perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain---they are things.

Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: "...forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation." However, relatively few people are "fully effective" at this purpose, because a proportion of society is "non-productive"---either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.

After you read the introduction of Davenport's book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.

Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people---who were, as Davenport puts it, a "burden" on society.

Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.

But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of "public health." Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don't recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.

"Sexual deviance" is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that "normal" people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.

For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.

If you read more of Davenport's book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements---he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren't. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.

Eugenics isn't just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.

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Look, this is what moral OCD is like for me:

I walk past a piece of paper. I don’t pick it up because I had a long day at work and it’s very cold outside. This then becomes my internal monologue:

I didn’t pick up that piece of paper, I should have. Don’t I care about the environment? It’s not my trash, I shouldn’t have to pick it up. But also that’s how these things happen right? We place the blame on others as our environment degrades. It was just a piece of paper, it’s not like it can do that much damage. But also how do I know: I’m not an environmental expert. Maybe stray paper scraps are killing the frogs. You’re literally killing the frogs. You should look up how many frogs die a year so you know how shitty you are-No stop it.

I care about the environment, and I recycle and I joined green activism movements but is that enough? I could be doing more. I should be doing more. I should donate my entire check to charity. But isn’t it self serving to think that my one check could help that much? Do I really think I’m that important, how self entitled and-no stop it, reset! You are obsessing and if you fall for it, you will not eat dinner. Let it go.

Okay it’s just a piece of paper. It’s okay you skipped it this once: it could have had something dangerous on it. Yeah that makes sense. But also, that means I’m putting my own safety over trying to help the environment, which is very selfish of me. I’m just one shitty person: god how could I be so self absorbed. I should have picked up the piece of paper. I’m so selfish, and shitty and-no, no, stop it! This is not helpful. It’s fine.

It’s been a long day and I’m cold, that’s not a crime- no that’s being selfish again, you’re making excuses. You’re just a lazy piece of shit who doesn’t care about others, and selfish and God the fact you’re thinking this much about one piece of paper shows how selfish you are, you care more about if you’re a good person than anything else, you’re a piece of shit, you’re a piece of shit, YOU’RE A PIECE OF SHIT.

I get home and open up Tumblr. The first post I see says “if you don’t reblog this post about the environment you’re as complicit as an oil billionaire.” I close my computer and resign myself to looking up the state frog populations until I go to bed.

I don’t eat dinner.

The amount of frogs that die a year is somewhere from 200 million to over 1 billion.