Crystal Mind

my parents trying to figure out what to get me for christmas

Trauma is such a broad concept that it's basically useless at this point. Honestly, I kind of resent how it has come to be treated as a universal theory of human behaviour.

And, actually, I want to talk about the genocide a little more, because people also use discourses of trauma to excuse explain the behaviour of the genocidaires. "Oh, it's because of Israel's national trauma over the October 7th attack; it's because of generational trauma from the Holocaust!" which....okay, yeah. I fully acknowledge those things are incredibly horrific to live through, and I have no reason to doubt that research on epigenetic changes being passed down to your offspring is valid, or that it affects how you raise your children. But then you see pictures of IDF soldiers smiling and laughing together as they commit war crimes and, like...is their behaviour really so much different from that of every other bunch of genocidal thugs in history that you need to invoke a particular cultural history of trauma in order to explain it? What about the Germans? Were they all just reeling from their collective national trauma over losing the First World War? What about the American cavalries as they slaughtered their way through the West? Was that all just generational trauma over...fuck, I dunno, their Puritan ancestors being kicked out of England or whatever? Is anyone ever responsible for anything they do, or is it all just a vast human centipede of generational suffering stretching back in time to Adam and Eve's trauma over being expelled from Paradise?

Help, my generational trauma forced me to do a fire-sale of expropriated Palestinian real estate!

wow i guess i spent too much time on the internet today cuz for a second i read ‘crochet’ as like. crocodile heterosexual. just for a moment there

Isn't it fucking insane that so many people think that IQs are real. Like people genuinely believe you are born with one set level of intelligence that can be measured on a scale from 1 to ~200. As if intelligence wasn't extremely nuanced and completely subjective. And the fact that the majority of scientists that have advocated for IQ tests in the past have been eugenicists doesn't seem to concern anyone either

there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try