The Lindy Badger

“Sparrow emphasizes that this doesn’t mean that the brain’s ability to remember facts and figures has atrophied — only that we don’t access this skill as much as we used to. If someone took your cell phone away forever,  you’d still be able to memorize important phone numbers, she says.

Now Sparrow is interested in studying whether there are any benefits to these changes in our memory function. For example, if you read an article about the Civil War, full of facts but also broader themes, would you be more likely to remember the larger takeaway messages if you expect to be able to get the names and dates online anytime you want?

"The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart. Each of those dots is only a single Tuesday or Friday or Sunday, but even a lucky person who lives to 90 will have no problem fitting every day in their life on one sheet of paper.

Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in activities or events. To use myself as an example: I probably eat pizza about once a month, so I’ve got about 700 more chances to eat pizza. I have an even brighter future with dumplings. I have Chinese food about twice a month and I tend to make sure six dumplings occurs each time, so I have a fuckton of dumplings to look forward to

It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.

So what do we do with this information? Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:

1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious."

Toxic masculinity says that a man is only as good as what he can accomplish.

When it comes to sex, this can often mean “To be a man, I have to achieve orgasm/ejaculation” or “I have to win as many sex partners as I can.”

These days, it can also mean “I have to give my partner the most intense pleasure possible.” Because if she has a body-shaking orgasm, it’s a mark of his skill and prowess. And if she doesn’t have an orgasm at all, it feels like a personal failure to him.

For the female partner, this can turn into yet another way she has to perform emotional labor. When her experience of pleasure becomes tied to his ego, then she often feels pressure to have a big, showy orgasm for him… even if that’s not how her body works.

Then my son says, “Stop that!” Everybody looks at him. “You’re hurting her!”

“Oh, sweetie,” the boy’s mom says, “he just likes her. He thinks she’s pretty. Don’t you think girls are pretty?”

I decide to let him handle it.

My son scowls enormously at the mom. “What does her being pretty have to do with hurting her?” “Oh, he’s not really hurting her. He’s just trying to get her attention.” The girl’s mom is nodding in agreement. “Don’t worry, she’s fine.” The girl’s expression is the very image of exasperation. And OB does it again. “OW! Stop it!” the girl finally snaps. “That hurt!”

My son steps forward, spins the other kid around by his shoulder, and punches him hard enough in the gut to drop him to his knees. “Oh my god! Scotty!” his mom yelps. “What do you think you’re doing?!” she yells at my son.

“Though “trans women are women” has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. She calls it a “vicious lie.”

“It’s a lie that sets us up to be triggered every time we are called he, or ‘guys’ or somebody dares to suggest that we have male biology,” she writes. “Even a cursory glance from a stranger can cut to our very core. The very foundations of our self-worth are fragile.”...

This year, however, Highwater joined Twitter, where she began to follow the furious battles between trans rights activists and those feminists derisively known as TERFs, or trans exclusionary radical feminists. The radical feminists—who, to be clear, don’t represent all feminists who think of themselves as radical—fundamentally disagree with trans activists on what being a woman means. To the mainstream trans rights movement, womanhood (or manhood) is a matter of self-perception; to radical feminists, it’s a material condition. Radical feminists believe women are a subordinate social class, oppressed due to their biology, and that there’s nothing innate about femininity. They think you can’t have a woman’s brain in a man’s body because there’s no such thing as a “woman’s brain.” As the British feminist writer Julie Bindel—a bete noire of many trans activists—put it, “Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?”

"It was very rare for women to major in engineering in 1989. They had bright futures and were leading the way for women in science. The killer objectified them as "feminists who were ruining his life."

”It remains a possibility that this was an act of Islamic terrorism. CBS reportsthat the couple had stockpiled 12 pipe-bombs and thousands of rounds of ammunition in their suburban home. But the fact that Farook shot up his co-workers wasn’t on the radar of counter-terrorism officials and that no group has claimed responsibility for the attack doesn’t appear to fit the pattern. Multiple overlapping motives for their rampage could be at play. Regardless of what motive ultimately comes out, the reality is that Muslims have committed only a minuscule fraction of the mass shootings in this country...

Perhaps the most frightening thing we know about gun violence comes from a study conducted by researchers at Duke, Harvard, and Columbia that was published earlier this year in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law. It found that almost one in 10 Americans who have access to guns are also prone to impulsive outbursts of rage. Among this group are almost 4 million people who carry their guns around in public and say they “have tantrums or angry outbursts,” “get so angry [that they] break or smash things” and lose their temper and “get into physical fights.” The researchers also found that those who own many firearms are significantly more likely to exhibit signs of uncontrollable anger than people who own just one. The authors of the study noted that very few among that group had been diagnosed with the kinds of mental illness that would be unearthed in a standard background check. They say that we need to start restricting gun ownership based on whether people have a history of violence, not on diagnosed mental illness...

Easy access to guns lies at the heart of the problem. No other developed country has as much gun violence or experiences mass shootings at a rate even close to approaching our own, and that we have the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world. We know that out of 185 mass shootings over a 13-year period studied by the FBI, only one was stopped by an ordinary civilian with a gun.

“Let’s take a closer look at the language we use for a moment, as Jackson Katz explains in this Ted Talk. Take this example: 

My boyfriend is a rapist. My boyfriend raped me. I was raped by my boyfriend. I was raped. I am a rape victim.

In this progression, “my boyfriend” becomes less and less vilified until he drops from the sentence completely. We start with the identity of him as a rapist and end with my identity as a rape victim. At the beginning, I was not in the sentence, and by the end, he is not. By the end, “my boyfriend” has dropped entirely out of the sentence and out of our minds. And so it is, years later I carry the trauma he does not. To him it is “that rape thing”, a blip from long ago. To him it’s not the feeling of being violated, the fear, numbness, and depression. To him, it’s not the broken promises and years of silence. To him it’s not panic attacks and chronic stomach and back pain from the stress. To him it’s not “I guess my family, friends, school, and the police all care more about my rapist than they do about me”. But it would be unfair of me to call him a rapist, right? He’s a good guy...

In The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule recounts working nights at a hotline beside her compassionate coworker, Ted Bundy, as they talked people down from the edge of suicide for hours night after night, during the time an unknown serial killer was on the loose. She recounts her shock when Bundy was discovered to be behind the killings. It’s a shock to hear someone you know has done something terrible to someone else, but does Bundy’s work at the hotline somehow lessen or excuse these crimes? Not in the least. Do we consider him a killer, a murderer? Of course. Do we call someone who robs a bank “the bank robber” even if he reads bedtime stories to his kids? Why would we not? So why do these excuses and justifications get bandied about when someone we know turns out to be a rapist?...

7. ‘Thought Shapes Reality’

Once, I was feeling a bit depressed for no particular reason.

When a family member asked me why, I said, “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m deciding to feel this way.” She said we do decide how we feel, which made me think there was something wrong with me for deciding to feel depressed.

Saying that we choose how we feel trivializes mental illness by implying that we could just get rid of anxiety or depression through the power of positive thinking if we tried hard enough.

Some people also gaslight others by applying this reasoning to physical illness: Mind trumps matter, the argument goes, so you could think away that migraine if you really wanted to.

"Luke Cage was created in 1972. Four years earlier, in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed. Five years before that, in 1963, Medgar Evers was shot and killed. Eight years before that, in 1955, a young Black man named Emmett Till was tortured, then shot and killed.

These events, and numerous others with frightening similarity, happened in a line, and in the early years of the first decade to reap the social benefits of the Civil Rights Movement, Marvel Comics gives the fans (and the world) a Black male superhero whose primary superhuman aspect… is that he's bulletproof.

Not flight, or super speed, or a power ring...

Is there any doubt the power fantasy of the Black man in the years following multiple assassinations of his leaders and children by way of the gun would be superhuman resistance to bullets?

There are Black men who are wealthy, powerful, formidable and/or dangerous. They can affect change undreamt of by their parents, and their parents' parents. Their children will be able to change the world in ways we can intuit and others we can barely begin to try and predict.

But a bullet can rip through their flesh and their future with no effort whatsoever.

And so we look at Luke Cage, a man who gets shot on a regular basis, whose body language is such that he is expecting to be shot at, prepared for the impact -- because he knows he can take it.

And maybe, in the subconscious of the uni-mind of Marvel Comics, is the understanding that Luke Cage may unfortunately always be a relevant fantasy idea for the Black man.

“Body neutrality is not thinking twice about that craving you have for a grande mocha coconut Frappuccino (with whipped cream, please) because it is neither a source of shame (“If I get it, I’ll do a non-fat, no-whip tall”) nor pride (“Let me post this on Tumblr so everyone knows how not worried about food I am!”). It’s simply satisfying a craving.