still your only son

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

And the psych guys are doing MRIs because that's the Next Big Thing, and any bias culturally relevant enough will get positive papers for it because the 100 labs will check their 100 papers and the 95 that show no difference at 95% confidence are of course never published because there's nothing to say. And the medicine guys are running ten thousand seaweed extract experiments to kill cancer cells, and their confidence intervals do tend to be better, but there is no defense against an industry where the only way to survive is to publish and the only way to get funding is to look into something that the grant committee wants you to find something interesting about, and you'd better find that something interesting even if you kind of have to publish your study before repeating it to check for that confidence interval -- someone else will repeat it, or you will once the paper's out, but you've got to get the paper out. And that paper had better be useful for other scientists to reference, even if you have to change the tone and the implications and choose which results are worth referencing, because getting more references is how you keep your job and how you convince the next grant committee.

Okay well first thing first: You did not betray your beliefs. You made a necessary choice in a situation with no available Good choices.

I mean, listen: did you have the societal authority to Go Out and Deal With Him yourself? Absolutely the fuck not. Did you have the training and professional experience to do so effectively? I'm guessing HELL no. Did you have anyone else available to call to help you deal with this situation? No!

You did not betray your beliefs.

You live in a society that has laws, and those laws provide for very limited means of addressing the potential violence of other people. You are simply not allowed, on my Tumblr, to attempt to hold yourself responsible for the failure of those societal institutions.

There, you're absolved of your sins.

Now, feeling frustrated and angry? That's totally different. Those institutions failed you! It's their fault, not yours! What the fuck is "he's on his property, he can do what he wants"? He was on your property when he showed up with a bongo drum and he was generating threats off his property when he was waving around a lethal weapon. Those cops were lazy.

And you didn't really ask, but I'll tell you what they could have done with that situation.

They could have finagled a way to arrest him. Let him get sober in jail or if it's not drugs doing this, require a mental health eval on release and not to return to that address. (This practice is hugely annoying and difficult for defendants who have no monetary resources, I would like to note, but if this guy's psychotic, someone in this process will probably catch a clue and refer him for a competency evaluation.)

And if they were bound and determined not to arrest him, what else could they do?

Well, a good start would be to discuss with his wife a safety plan, and tell her that if she can get the guns out of immediate sight that would be a good idea, as well as knives and other immediately obvious weapons (bows and arrows not usually on this list, but it's a situationally flexible recommendation). They should also have gone through the standardized domestic violence risk assessment that has been adopted by many states at this point, and told her that she comes out high-risk twice simply by virtue of the coexistence of "divorce" and "firearms." At that point, they should have connected her to a hotline with a domestic violence shelter to discuss more elaborate safety planning.

The officers then should have filed a specific report that could be referenced quickly by other officers, put out a warning about that guy, shittalked him on the radio for everyone to hear, and made sure everyone was on the lookout for him doing something weird and violent.

As long as there is still suffering to be had, Jean Valjean cannot die

Jean Valjean has super strength which cannot be depleted by age or his poor ability to look after himself (up to a point)

Once a person has met Cosette, lack of proximity to her will slowly drain their life force

The dead benevolently haunt those they loved while alive (ily ghost!Fantine)

Javert has an incredible ability to recognise potential criminals (read people from lower social classes)

Eponine has the ability to blend into the background but cannot turn this power off

オレ…今夜ひとりで寝ようと思うんですよ…オトナなんで…

しかしオレはこのあと3ぷんごにおにかいへ行きました…

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