#we read your journal

[maybxlle]

i have decided im not gonna journal anymore

[bmpmp3]

sorry to be a bit of a hater but i do wish youtubers weren't so scared of making their videos just like, "reviews", whys everything gotta be a "video essay" all the time. every day my recommendations are filled with 40 minute videos titled "_____: An Underrated Masterpiece" where the first like five minutes are reading the wikipedia definition of "masterpiece" in a somber voice with dramatic themed text on screen. please just tell me how good or bad you think something is and use the rest of the runtime to explain why. you dont need to put on all these airs

[jadelemonadee]

give me a complex rundown of samuels personality in your mind when i say complex i mean complex like 3 paragraphs

shiiiit okay here we go fasten your seatbelts (guys idk if i’ll be able to stretch this shit out into three paragraphs but I DID get the best score on my essay about bottled water for a standardized test soo…,) also im going to be stealing a lot of stuff from genius annotations and other things beware

ALRIGHT HERE WE GO so how i see him personally is just this annoying, stuck up guy who is the #1 george III glazer (/j) + he views himself as above the revolutionists and sees them as these vulgar barbarians who are trying to lead people to “the dark side” (don’t let them lead you astray) BUUUT although he acts all righteous, hamilton pushes him off of that high horse of his (and almost his box…,literally) with his AWESOME EPIC WITTY writing and argumentative skills showing that seabury wasn’t even all that in the first place (and NOT ELOQUENT!!!! cmon man you can’t be acting all high and mighty and then epically lose a debate to someone young enough to be your son HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE THAT 19 YEAR OLD DOES IT FOR YOU😭😭) another thing ive noticed is that whenever hamilton speaks there’s little to no instruments in the background maybe showing that he doesn’t even need music for support of his arguments and to completely obliterate samuel (just listen to the instrumental trust…….idk where im going with this alright it’s 12:10 as im typing this part)

okay some other things i want to add are little details about this whole shabang like how seabury’s accent seems almost forced, as if he’s trying to create similarities between him and the beloved figure of his majesty (/sar 😛) and the fact that seabury went by the name A.W. farmer in his papers about the revolution which IN THE MUSICAL could maybe be another example of my previous point since one of the king’s nicknames was “farmer george” (although as far as i know it was used some with political satirists….SAMUEL FCS DO SOME RESEARCH BEFORE MAKING YOUR KING GEORGESONA OR SMTH😭😭😭) secondly i really like the detail that lin had both seabury and the king’s songs both include instruments like the harpsichord + they both use formal vocabulary meanwhile The Revolution People (TM) use more modern slang + instruments in their songs, showing the growing contrasts and conflicts between the loyalists and patriots!!!! so cool we love you LMM anywho also the fact that seabury soon realizes after hamilton starts interrupting him that he won’t be able to beat hamilton with words so he might as well try to physically get ahead of him (pushing the box in front of him ect ect) and then doing his big “FOR SHAME” near the end as a last resort, “modulating the key” as they call it /j (this one was said by thayne himself) lastly just the fact that you can hear the guys making barking and whining noises after hamilton makes his epic mange joke….,,like that’s so silly i love that for them

i did it i technically did three paragraphs ARE YOU HAPPY ANON /j

[dazais-guardian-angel]

JOHNATHAN AND MINA AUUUGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *CRIES AND SCREAMS*

[charcoalhell]

everyone stop reading sellout and where are your boys tonight and START reading my most beloved work on emo ever judith may fathallah’s emo: how fans defined a subculture. none of the men who keep writing the same exact surface-level books about 2000s emo understand 2000s emo even a fraction as much as her. this one frames emo as a queer/feminine internet subculture and tracks emo trinity fandom online from early 00s to late 2010s. just a hot tip from your local emo scholar who has been researching emo and gender in college and grad school for an unjustifiably long time

[lunityviruz]

If you wanna see a loser bitch get mad as hell tell a fanfic writer to PROPERLY tag their fic as rape. Not just write "noncon" in the post but go into the notes and actually tag it as "tw rape" because they get mad asf when you call them out on it. How the fuck am I supposed to find good smut fics when each and everyone of yall are sexualizing and romanticizing rape and using the excuse that it's "dark content" no nigga you're fucking weird. You're a weirdo with a rape fetish and you're projecting it through a fictional character who has nothing to do with that and you refuse to tag it because you want notes and interactions with more people who say shit like "Omg X character nonconning his darling is sooo hot 🥺💗🎀🌸".

Don't get mad at me for calling you out on it because if you didn't write it in the first place, and if you actually tagged it I wouldn't have to see it at all.

[swaglet]

considering the state of US education in recent years, and the fact that a considerable amount of this site's userbase is like 20 or younger fresh oit of the system, it's completely understandable that almost everyone on here is a fucking moron who has developed no critical thinking skills whatsoever & probably doesn't even know how to use context clues. bomb the country NOW what are they doing to our youth

[thereareeyesinsidethetrees]

y’know if there’s one good thing that came out of the book of bill, it’s that you can’t take it as canon and be a proponent of same coin theory at the same time

[coquelicoq]

i've gotten so used to my daily practice of reading french aloud that now when i have to read something boring in english for work i default to reading it aloud. which takes way longer and also i feel like i retain even less information than i would otherwise, somehow. the upside is that my oral reading cadence in english, even of dense scientific articles, is rather excellent nowadays. i could read scientific articles out loud for a living, if that was a thing people needed me to do. which they do not, because screenreaders are a thing. maybe i could read crusty PDFs out loud for a living? but anyway all this is to say shoutout to my man alexandre dumas and also my other man victor hugo for training me to read run-on sentences in my second language. after that, dry journal articles in my first language are easy peasy.

[munamania]

when i say get me OUT OF HERE. yeah ok so i redownloaded the devils app (tinder) and after swiping through all the like spam and couples and random men that popped up and stuff i got to someone and i was like Oh theyre hot they seem cool geeked abt seeing if we match. HALT! is that my friend sams roommate. fuck. right. and is that another gay girl that maybe tried to slide in my dms once but i was so far up film girl's ass at the time i didnt think about it. in their one photo. right. and what's their name? we dont need to talk about it. im sick

[yuukimiyas]

‧˚₊( ˶ ⁰∀⁰)‧˚₊ happy friyay!! i hope everyone had a v great tgiving & are ready for a fresh new day!! ꒰ ¨̮ ꒱⸝♡ i work all day today but im gonna try my hardest to catch up w stuff!! ilyasm!! see ya later!!

[bloodbankzz]

it is painful to learn the "normal" ways that people reasonably around my age were motivated to do things their parents wanted, ie chores or getting good grades in school. this is a pain that has built over time because, seeing it around me as a kid, i could reason that maybe every single one of my friends were just spoiled. but, eerily, every time it seems the topic of motivating children comes up in whatever conversation is bringing it up, it seems like. and it still feels presumptuous to say. but most people as children were rewarded for good behavior. the one i was most envious of as a child was that multiple of my friends got paid money for getting As, and it was actually very shocking to me to find out that that is at least kind of a little more universal than i really really was sure it was not, but that's not the big thing that causes me pause now. generally, it seems, children are rewarded in some way for doing things their parents ask of them. writing and then stepping back and reading such a sentence makes me feel like an alien trying to puzzle out the function of the human pancreas lmfao but i dont know. in the wider conversations where this happens to come up, describing these motivators is never the point, which is maybe part of the difficulty for me. it's really hard to process that not everyone was doing what their parents said to do out of cold pure fear for their life. there's so many things it turns out other kids were getting. stickers and movie tickets and candy and praise and love. i am so sad.

[iglowlilac]

you're an angel

i'm a dog ---- SO TRUE

[waterfallofspace]

i see YOU as dinosaur oatmeal and vampire (because nobody could possibly give you enough credit for how creative you are ToT and also... your style is so vampire)

sobbing, i would take such good care of the beanie i promise 💗😭🫂 This is so sweet and... aughugehuh I honestly love that my style comes off Vampire???? Like i love that!~ (and ghaughu... i don't think I deserve it, but thank you so much!~ <3333)

[good-to-drive]

John Lennon, Richard Nixon, and Presentism in Our Discussion of Mental Illness

So I'm reading a new book about Richard Nixon and it's got me thinking about presentism in how we discuss Richard Nixon's mental illness(es), and, because I have Beatles brainrot, it's also got me thinking about whether this same mentality could affect how we talk about John.

Both Nixon and John's lives were heavily influenced by their lifelong battles with severe, persistent mental illness, but understanding the historical context of that battle and how it was fundamentally different from what a person might experience today seems to be largely ignored.

We tend to talk about Nixon in particular as if a) he or someone around him had identified that he was exhibiting symptoms of depression, paranoid delusions, and (most likely) psychosis, b) that he or someone around him understood these conditions as so-called "no fault" illnesses that could/should be treated, and c) that this treatment would have been effective.

In other words, we still understand Nixon's mental deterioration as if it had happened today.

Now, to be clear, a LOT of people in Nixon's inner circle described behavior that they personally found unsettling, and the Pentagon had stopped taking orders from the White House by the end of Nixon's presidency because they were so disturbed by his degree of disconnection from reality. So I'm not trying to argue that his condition went unnoticed -- rather, we can reasonably say that almost no one in Nixon's inner circle believed he was "normal."

(I mean, he literally screamed at God and had conversations with portraits of former presidents. It wasn't subtle.)

But the entire conceptualization of mental disorders as legitimate illnesses that can/should be treated was nowhere near as prevalent during Watergate as it is today. Even if the people around him recognized that Nixon was "acting crazy", it's not realistic to project our own ideas about mental illness onto them and assume that they conceptualized that behavior as an illness that Nixon could not control and had not chosen, believed that it was possible to treat that illness, or even had any desire to see that illness be treated.

(Incidentally, the only significant medical intervention in response to Nixon's illness was to start dosing him with anticonvulsants, resulting in significant memory loss.)

It's less clear whether Nixon himself was aware that he was losing touch with reality (my guess is "kinda"), but even if he did have insight into his mental condition he almost definitely didn't have deep familiarity with terms like "PTSD" and "psychotic break" that might help him understand what was happening to him. We can also assume that, if he did have some inkling of what was happening to him, he likely felt an even greater sense of self-hatred and revulsion at his own condition than a person might experience today.

I know there's still a huge stigma around "bad" mental illnesses, but I also know I'm incredibly lucky to have experienced a psychotic break in 2014 and not 1974. Mental hospitals were still sometimes referred to as "snake pits" because they were so horrible, and the average person did not consider someone with severe, persistent mental illness to have any future or hope whatsoever. I'm not a doctor, much less a doctor from the 70s, so I truly don't know what the prognosis for someone like Nixon would have been. But Nixon himself most likely would have believed it was very poor.

To put this another way, Nixon’s ability to have insight into his own illness was impaired by the lack of insight in the society in which he lived, and the way he processed his own experiences would have been more heavily rooted in confusion, shame, and hopelessness. Also, the degree to which we can hold Nixon to blame for failing to manage his mental illness and pursue effective treatment definitely isn't zero, but it's certainly not on par with what you could expect of a person today.

Now I'm absolutely NOT saying any of that to give Dick a free pass for the horrible things he did and said (any more than I think we should give John a free pass). Nixon was a monster in many ways. But I'd rather understand a monster within their actual context than within an imagined one.

TL;DR I think it's worthwhile to ask ourselves whether we're looking at one of the defining factors in Dick and John's lives through a distorted lens, and, if so, how that distorts our perception of them as human beings.