#i am not a doctor just some dickhead with an internet connection

[cracknoir]

ive spent the morning i’ve managed to skive off work trying to diagnose jimmy hopkins so here’s an extended medical review of James Anthony Hopkins 

so i’ve done some some research and i think these personality disorders apply to jimmy 

Paranoid personality disorder

Pervasive distrust and suspicion of others and their motives

Unjustified belief that others are trying to harm or deceive you

Unjustified suspicion of the loyalty or trustworthiness of others

Hesitancy to confide in others due to unreasonable fear that others will use the information against you

Perception of innocent remarks or nonthreatening situations as personal insults or attacks

Angry or hostile reaction to perceived slights or insults

Tendency to hold grudges

Unjustified, recurrent suspicion that spouse or sexual partner is unfaithful

Schizoid personality disorder

Lack of interest in social or personal relationships, preferring to be alone

Limited range of emotional expression

Inability to take pleasure in most activities

Inability to pick up normal social cues

Appearance of being cold or indifferent to others

Little or no interest in having sex with another personi

i’ve intentionally left narcissism out - i don’t really think jimmy’s a narcissist, just can be a narcissist sometimes, i think his schizoid personality traits fade and resurface. i’m not trying to retroactively insert these disorders, im tryna like, apply it to stuff i’ve written, so I’d say the SPD stuff applies to teenage jim and post-zoe jim, that sweet spot where he was on top of the world he was a total narcissist. 

Also I guess i should also write down i think jimmy’s been hospitalized bc of drug use a few times. he’s had mini-strokes from mdma use, had to have veins in his hands fixed because of cocaine use and he MIGHT have had plastic surgery to fix his nose??? idk tho one nostrils deffo bigger than the other. i once seen a guy put his pinky through the middle of his nose so idk maybe jimmy can do that. i ain’t gonna go into injuries here, feel like i’ve been over his fucked up body a million times

[the0ther-side0f-dawn]

just some thoughts

y’ever think about how lucky we are to be alive right now?

like, i hope this doesn’t come off too ignorant, because i know im  not nearly enough educated on the histories of a lot of peoples in this world,

but at least for me,

today, is the best age yet.

but it’s also so so so depressing, that after all this time, where we have had not just decades, but centuries, where we could have made so much progress, but simply didn’t, that this is the best we have.

like as a woman, today, although yes, my worldview from the get-go has been notably influences by the gender binary, in the way that “X” thing is for girls and “Y” thing is for boys, like things like when i was little boys did sports, girls did dance, etc. (not that I ever did either because we were too poor for lessons or clubs). However, my opportunities have never been any less than the boys and men around me. In fact, I found girls were offered extra opportunities to try to balance the inequalities that exist in fact. Like there were Women’s Leadership seminars and such.

And then, as someone with mental disorders, although, I am yet to find a parent or a therapist who actually takes me seriously, i have been fortunate that I was never put in an asylum, as may have been the case in the early 20th century. I’m not saying my case has been good, because I have instead been completely invalidated, or mostly, anyhow. And when my mother saw I was struggling, her response was to tell me “quit whining” and if i don’t stop she will make me go to a Doctor, which is a threat. And it took me years to give in and say, “Okay.” -because she wasn’t offering help, she didn’t care if I got better, she just wanted me to shut-up, and get out of bed in the morning and go to school without complaining that i felt sick at least 10times each morning. And I have heard about friends that were forced into therapy. I’m not saying it’s good, but damn, it could be so much worse.

And then, as a lesbian, although not out, I have never faced any blatant discrimination, or violence, or direct injustice. I am allowed to exist safely in online spaces, and I have friends, and allies, etc. I still have a super homophobic mother, and a brother who is a dickhead, and sister who I am so sad to watch slowly adapt their viewpoints, and even tho i never have dated anyone, they are completely accepting that “i just want to focus on school” is an ok response and they don’t prod further. We no longer live in this age of forced marriages, where as Kasey Musgraves put it “If you aint got 2 kids by 21, youre problem gonna die alone, at least thats what tradition told you”.

And then as an Australian, despite having lived below the poverty line of this nation, my entire life, I haven’t ever really been disadvantaged. Noone ever knew we were poor. My parents built the house in ‘96, took them about 15 yrs but they paid it off, we own a whole acre, when times were particularly bad, we had access to services such as the foodbank, we have always had fresh rain water, clean clothes, a warm bed (ok thats a lie. winter is cold af, no matter how many blankets you have). I’ve been able to go to uni, and college, completely supported by government welfare and scholarships. whenever I’ve been sick, we could afford medicine, etc. #ThanksHealthCare .  but like the fact that we were quite poor compared to our friends was obvious to us, when they get PSPs for xmas and we got books,  etc etc. like there was quite apparent inequality, and im quite grateful for bargain department stores like kmart that are providing semi-quality goods at a fraction of the price, which help cover up this gap, and the internet which allows us to make connections outside of our class, etc. Like I know, even if you just go to the US, things are so much worse that like y’all don’t have a decent minimum wage, and there’s more class segregation, which we still have, but I think to a lesser degree.

In short, It’s depressing how much things suck, but also we’re, or at least i’m, so incredibly grateful to exist now and not in an earlier era.

[crunchyenglish]

Angry Lunatic's Scientific Journal of Shit I Made Up. Vol. This One

Feeling uncharacteristically productive today, and my new job is unusually slow. Time for another edition of my extremely occasional series, where I take the bold, dynamic declarations of the internet's lowest life forms and try to hold them up as an actual scientific hypothesis. I also try to learn something, which is usually the easy part given my limited knowledge base and tremendously narrow worldview. And since I'm making pretty liberal use of the word "scientific", here's the usual disclaimer:

I am not, and never have been a scientist. My education is paltry and laughable. Part of the point of this series is that this knowledge is freely available to anyone with an internet connection (which all my targets obviously have) and a desire to learn (which all my targets obviously lack). My only qualifications are a willingness to spend sometime Googling and a desire to showcase the stupidity of others.

Note: A lot of the dumbest discourse on the Internet these days is political in nature. Nothing seems to shut down people's ability to reason and function quite as much as cheering for or against a political party. And that landscape is currently filled bizarre conspiracy theories that are deeply tempting to rebuke or debunk. However, they aren't really in the spirit of this series, and unfortunately politics breeds that stuff because there's a lot of grey area and no source is considered very objective these days. Also, no one following politics has ever learned anything except "we are a fucked up species", and learning is my stated secondary goal.

So, with the housekeeping out of the way, let's get to this issue's hypothesis. This one comes to us from Mathew Shields. From his website, "He is a free- lance researcher and international speaker on the human energy field, paranormal phenomenon and healing techniques to name a few." That's right, it's time for this journal to up its game and beginning analyzing the claims of professional bullshitters. Mat Shields is a top-shelf dickhead with a bunch of suckers following in tow, and this claim in particular stands out as primo material for our little article:

"Negative Ions- the invisible healer.

Negative ions enhance our mood, stimulate our senses, improve appetite and sexual drive, provide relief from hay fever, sinusitis, bronchial asthma, allergies, migraines, even post operative pain and burns. Negative ions stimulate the reticuloendothelial system which is a group of defense cells in our bodies which marshal our resistance to disease. Negative ions promote alpha brain waves and increased brain wave amplitude which results in a higher awareness level. The body is better able to absorb oxygen into the blood cells, oxidize serotonin and filter airborne contaminants."

That's actually just the opening to a much larger article, in which Mat tells people to keep their shower running constantly in their house, since water in motion produces more "negative ions" than standing water. Before I get angry (ok, I admit it, too late) let's take a moment and appreciate this fine, thick slice of bullshit. This really is a master class. You can tell we've moved up to the big leagues here. You can't tweet this level of bullshit. It's got a bunch of impressive sounding words. It's claims are vague and opaque enough to confuse and desirable enough to tempt. Truly splendid bullshit. Now, let's figure out how we're going to take it down.

Negative Ions are a widespread health myth, propagated by all sorts of pseudo-doctor types. Typing "Negative Ions" into Google is going to get you a lot of positive results, and not all on homemade web pages with links to a Zionist World Order Theory in the sidebar. Sites like WebMD, Nutrition Review and other seemingly "reliable" sites have hosted blogs, articles and editorials by all stripes of quacks, most of whom are happy to push this narrative in order to sell you "negative ion generators" or "negative ion bracelets" or some other brand of this particular snake oil. And the health claims are exactly the kind of unspecific promises on which pseudo-science thrives: more energy, better sex drive, clearing up headaches, the works. Let's start with what a "negative ion" is even supposed to be.

An Ion, as you learned for a test and then promptly forgot in school, is an atom or molecule which is carrying a "charge". This charge is either positive or negative, dependent upon the number of electrons versus the number of protons. More electrons creates a net negative charge, fewer creates a net positive charge. The actual term for a negatively charged ion is an anion. This is a clever dodge by the quacks here. If you google "Negative Ions" you get all their bullshit, in no way hampered by any actual science, because people who know what the fuck they're talking about don't use that phrase. 

Supposedly, these electron discrepancies are the source of "Negative Ion"'s "healing" powers. The only thing Anions should attract are positively charged ions, called cations. This is simple electromagnetism. Negative attracts positive and repels other negatively charge particles. Arguably, you could say that Anions would also "repel" or push out other Anions, but if that's how they work you wouldn't feel any of their numerously claimed benefits. So, unless positively charged Ions, cations, are constantly draining you of energy, causing you pain, making your dick wilt, and are giving you hay fever, then there's no reason for fucking Anions to have any benefit to you.

And I can even prove cations aren't doing that. Coulomb's law bitches! I could try to stumble through a basic explanation, but for the sake of accuracy, let's just cut and paste this next part:

Coulomb's law states that: The magnitude of the electrostatic force of attraction between two point charges is directly proportional to the product of the magnitudes of charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The force is along the straight line joining them.

Short answer, if for some reason, you had a bunch of positively charged cations clogged up in your body, you would be constantly discharging them anyway. You are constantly coming into contact with Anions, they are exceptionally common. You don't need "constantly splashing water", or a "negative ion generator" whatever the fuck that's supposed to do. Oxygen is a goddamn Anion. Fluoride is an Anion. Chloride is an Anion. Cyanide is a goddamn, fucking Anion.

Ions are everywhere.  I mean it, fucking EVERYWHERE. The forming of covalent bonds is the literal building blocks of the entire universe. To somehow suggest that nearly everything in the universe is divided into "neutral atoms", "the good thingys" and the "bad thingys" is fucking infantile nonsense. It's stupid on a level that I can barely comprehend and I once scrolled through Trump's twitter feed for nonsense for another article. If you're having trouble understanding the absolute incoherency of the bullshit here, let me try an example.

Imagine if I told you that all nutrition was categorized in three ways - Solid, Liquid and Jell-O. Now imagine that I also tried to convince you that Liquid was "The Bad One" and tried to sell you a device that turned all liquid food into Jell-O. That's the level of arbitrary crazy we're talking here. The only apparent thing you have to do to convince people to buy your shit is keep the benefits vague and use science-y sounding bullshit like "Negative Ions".

This one was less experimental than some other articles I've written. I didn't cite my sources properly, and I ranted a lot more. That's because I'm starting to think that writing rebuttals and thought experiments is the wrong tact for solving this problem. Maybe you need to already be a trusted quack and then tell people to their face that you simply fooled them and stole their money.

To that end, I'm proud to announce my new product - the Energy Wave Modulator Collar. Simply place it around your neck and let it's natural minerals effortless modulate the alpha waves in your brain and the beta...channels...in your....ehhh, let's say eyes. You'll see results in just a few days, or hours, or weeks. Your headaches will be far less frequent and more manageable. Your energy levels will rise. Your sensation of taste will greatly improve, and everything will smell just slightly like vanilla. You'll gain immunity to bee-stings. Your dick will stay incessantly hard for days at a time. If you don't have a dick your uterus will make friends with you and never hurt ever again out of respect for that one time you came to its birthday party. You will suddenly eat healthier and make better romantic choices. Buy my shit, losers.