Let me tell you a story ...

tell me you love it. tell me it made you slam your laptop shut. tell me you brought it up at your college lecture about kink. key smash in all caps. quote the passage that made you think. i promise, we’ll love it.

This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.

She sang it.

Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.

She was twenty-three.

Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.

She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."

By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.

So Joe found Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.

In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.

Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).

Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.

While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.

They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.

When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.

She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.

The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.

Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.

Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.

Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.

The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.

Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.

July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.

Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.

JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.

Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.

Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.

Nobody asked her. The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death. Full story with complete sourcing

Like I just love "Guy who sneaks into the offices of famous Starfleet captains to take a picture of himself behind their desk". It's both:

Perfectly plausible for there to be someone like that.

first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.

hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.

this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.

hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.

this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.

Yes, she mocks rape victims. She threatens litigation against the mildest criticism against her. She has created an LGB group to make it so very clear that trans people are not welcome where she gives money. She is the funding behind Scotland saying trans women aren't legally women. The list goes on.

But. I promise you, 99% of the people around you don't know she's done any of this because they aren't following her social media or stories about her. To them, she is just the author of those fun wizard books. You gotta talk about how she's SO WEIRD and ISN'T IT SAD.

You need to tell the normies how she uses the funds from all her payout agreements for ALL Harry Potter licensing, including the re-release of these movies.

"It's so fucking weird. It's so fucking off-putting. It's so fucking sad." Say that over and over. Don't try to tie it into larger ideas. This is not how people will listen. "Isn't it just fucking sad she has all this money that could go to literacy or scholarships, and she's using it to attack people who are just living their lives? What a weird fucking choice."

We need to out-Morbius Morbius in terms of this tanking, and the way you do that is talk to normies about how fucking WEIRD and RUDE she is. How ODD that the second Fantastic Beasts movie gave a "actually, fascism isn't too bad" vibe all the way through and especially at the end. How she has complained that the child actors from those movies particularly don't agree with her views on trans people and that she's publicly said that's why she wanted a new show.

What a WEIRD thing to say about child actors you worked with over a decade ago. It's so WEIRD she would care that those child actors have different opinions than her. It's really SAD she apparently has no hobbies except posting on social media about how she hates trans people. A beloved author who could be using her name to raise money for animal rescues and homeless people and all sorts of really great causes that could improve people's lives, and she's out here doing THIS? It just bums me out. I just can't support someone who uses their money to harass and harm other people like this. I don't know WHY she acts like this or WHY she's chosen to make it her whole personality, but it just makes it really hard for me to want to support any Harry Potter stuff, even when I loved it so much. Knowing any money made from that franchise goes into her pocket to just pour out onto orgs and laws that tell adults they can't just live their lives and be left alone is WEIRD.

And then say what you're gonna be doing instead. You know, I'm going to go and find some new fantasy books at the library. I'm going to boardgame day down at the game store. I'm going to a stitching group. I'm going to host a 1980s fantasy fest at my place; do you have any favorites you recommend? We should have a film fest where we watch all the movies that scared the shit out of us as kids.