Vi's everything blog

the first were taken in one of lublin’s old synagogues and the third at the polin museum of polish jewry in warsawa, respectively.

in the third photo, i’m posing with a poster for yiddish socialist youth that’s the same design as the shirt i’m wearing— total coincidence, i promise.

my family ancestry is primarily ukranian (i think around odessa) and belarusian, but these are neighboring regions to present-day poland. it was an experience both moving and excruciating to dwell on the historical jewish bones of a country that stripped clean the flesh of living jewish memory.

i bought a book at the polin museum on the academic antisemitism that’s proliferated since the beginning of the war— a dog’s longing for a wolf in the woods, by joanna tokarska-bakir. this is a quote from the final paragraph:

I know we all know this, but it helps to hear sometimes.

I love being a Jew. I love that I look forward to Shabbat services. I love that I'm looking forward to the High Holidays, I love that I've been tapped to do the aliyah for the Rosh Hashanah Torah chanting, I love that I successfully wrote my own name in Hebrew, at 32 years old, for the first time this past week, I love learning and growing and connecting and continuously rolling up my sleeves to enthusiastically wrestle with my identity with love and compassion and excitement.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

In a recent trip to a used bookstore, I found this, which looks like a wormy can indeed:

But I figure, if someone wrote this book they’re either going to be extremely wrong or have some really interesting things to say.

Much to my amusement and amazement, the introduction of the book is talking a lot about queer theory, abuse, harm (all things that are my areas of expertise), and Palestine. Couldn’t have timed this one better, I guess. Worth noting that it’s from 2016, so a lot has changed as far as the global perception of that conflict (understatement).

It is worth noting here that the author does not deny the reality of abuse or the harm of abuse, but clarifies that she's talking about a different thing. A different thing that is when stuff that is not abuse is treated like abuse and that rhetoric and mindset is used to justify subsequent actions.

This caught me cold:

HUH.

For screen-reading compatibility and ease, the text is as follows:

In this book, I bring fifty-seven years of living and thirty-five years of writing to a critical conclusion: that from the most potent potential for intimacy between strangers, to intimate domestic moments between lovers, to the claims of the state on its citizens, to the geopolitical phenomena of mass murder, we witness a continuum. Namely, false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideologies should be actively challenged. Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming those paradigms.

Fuckign. Yes. (Emphasis added is mine.) Her particular example here is the resistance to the silence imposed from above regarding the AIDS epidemic, and how those protests were treated as active harm by the government and punished as such.

This is exactly the shit I've been thinking about for the last few days to an uncanny degree.

She goes on to talk about how Part One of the book is about distinguishing between conflict and abuse, starting within households and relationships and expanding to the realm of the state, then going on to "trying to understand how the police became the arbiters of our relationships" (YES!!!!! HOW???), and exploring these concepts in historical context.

Then on to summarize what she's doing in part 2, and this hit me like a water balloon on a hot day:

First paragraph:

Once this relationship between overstating harm and the Abuse by the state is established, I start to unravel some of the reasons why people are compelled to escalate. The centerpiece of this dynamic is the role of "bad" groups in encouraging bullying and shunning instead of peacemaking. Escalation is the key consequence of refusing to problem-solve or negotiate, and it demands our attention as a central obstacle to peace and justice.

But then I really want to linger on this last paragraph here. The rest is putting into words insights that I think I've already had. This last one is bringing up something that I have literally never thought of before.

In Chapter Five, I examine how Traumatized behavior and Supremacy ideology resemble each other, how both produce distorted thinking that seeks unreasonable levels of control over other people and does not tolerate self-criticism or difference. I propose a release of the stigma around recognizing mental illness, distorted thinking, and anxiety, and suggest that they be publicly and commonly recognized as contributing sources of this intolerance and control. And I try to look at cultural denial of these manifestations of distorted thinking as a strategy for the enforcement of dominance.

This. This feels like it might be cooking with fire. This is an extremely interesting thought and I think it bears a lot of exploration. It feels true, which means I'm going to be extremely critical of it going forward as I read and see how well it passes stress tests.

I was initially quite excited but then something during what’s listed as the “opening credits” / Introduction jumped out at me as concerning. In fact, so concerning, I’m pretty sure what I wrote is longer than the amount of book I consumed. It literally is a whole essay on around ~10 minutes of content. Still, I felt compelled to share. I feel compelled because what I see feels emblematic of the problem of trying to communicate anything at all about Israel-Palestine.

(just so you know, OP, none of this is at you, I’m at a computer and you weren’t. I’m just engaging with it because I’m… sad 😕. I was excited before this part cuz I liked what I read from your post, so I hope you find this helpful)

0. The thing that brought me here

Starting at 6 minutes and 37 seconds or (6:37) of the Spotify recording voiced by the Author:

“In the late spring of 2014, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu escalated pressure on the already suffering Palestinians. And some factions within Gaza responded with rockets that were of such poor quality, they had only symbolic impact. The Israeli government re-reacted in turn to this response with over 50 days of aerial bombing, and ground invasion, causing mass death and massive destruction of literal, cultural, and psychological infrastructure. The Gazans were reacting to a state of injustice that the Israelis had created. The Gazans were resisting. They were refusing to go along with unbearable and unjustifiable treatment. The Israelis experience this resistance to ongoing unfair treatment as attack.”

To be completely honest, and this is a feature of the fact that I don’t have skin in the game and don’t have to be on alert to things like this, I mostly skimmed over what she said about Israel and Palestine. To me, it seemed clear that she felt strongly that no one in the world was listening to the suffering of Palestinians, and so her perception of and portrayal of the conflict was aimed specifically at getting more attention to that cause. Since the book is ten years old, obviously it predates the surge in general awareness that happened later.

So my brain essentially labeled that as an advocacy that in many ways was no longer relevant because what it was advocating for had come to pass.

And like. It does seem to me that bombing in response to terrorism is an excessive response and places value on Our Civilians at an unconscionable ratio to Their Civilians, with the correct figures. I think most people would hear about these figures and at the very least feel some big Yikes about israel’s choices.

However I do not think if I was writing this book that I would have picked that as an example. Also because this book examines not just a universal human thing but also a particular way that this universal human thing is exacerbated by American culture, so examples from outside American culture are inherently limited anyway!!

Finally: You don’t crack open Israel and Palestine in this way unless you have an agenda in doing so. Agendas are not necessarily negative, but they make me tend to evaluate the information provided through a lens. And automatically, I felt an Agenda with her mention of the conflict, because it’s full of “people SHOULD be” type language regarding the worldwide reaction to Gaza. Should is a value judgment and makes me very suspicious.

I do think there’s a real critique here also (I add “also” particularly because I wrote that sentence without “also” at first and it sounded like I was dismissing your critique as not real, when that is not what I want to do, so “also” it is) that she is grasping at a truth about conflict vs. abuse, that there are real revelations being made in the realm of conflict, but that there is an abuse-related paradigm that is still being applied potentially in places where it’s thin or not useful to the topic at hand. I want to get into that more as it relates to the later chapter she has on Canada and the criminalization of infecting a sexual partner with HIV, and I think there’s a post brewing in me on that.

I just don’t think she’s quite able to shrug off all the paradigms she’s critiquing, essentially. Which, 1) whomst among us can disregard all our paradigms, and 2) explains why some of these track into, uh shall we say difficult territory without support.

And like. It does seem to me that bombing in response to terrorism is an excessive response

This isn't simple terrorism. This is all-consuming terrorism. Terrorism that victimizes both Israelis and Palestinians. This isn't "another american school shooting," it's army using 5 year old's bedroom to store weapons. It's army using the surgeon's room as a military base. It's every person in Gaza is either actively participating in this terrorism, or is subject to the destruction of their civilian lives as a terrorist group uses their civilian playground and turns it into a dangerous area to be in. It's stealing donations to build more ammunition, rather than feed your starving population.

I genuinely do not think you fully understand the mindset here, and that makes sense. You have not been exposed to the middle eastern mindset. You view everything through a Western lens.

You, as an American, believe in the 1st amendment, ya? It's your right as an american.

Take that as a concept and apply it to these palestinian terror (Islamists, in general) groups. They have the right to murder Jews. (And any infidels.) It is something they must uphold and ACTIVELY work towards. An ideal to always be striving towards.

To that end, their entire schooling revolves around this concept. Instead of 'Jane has 5 oranges and gives Mike 3, how many oranges does she have left,' it's 'you killed 4 Jews and your friend killed 2. How many dead Jews are there?'

This is the culture they're encouraging, and it's how you end up with a 20 something year old gleefully calling his parents to tell them he murdered 10 Jews.

And this is something you, as an American, will never understand. Because it is a concept and culture which is the exact opposite of western values*. And refusing to acknowledge all of the evidence which demonstrates this, simply because your mind can not comprehend such depravity under the guise of morality, is not our fault, but there is no need to go around defending it.

and places value on Our Civilians at an unconscionable ratio to Their Civilians,

This is giving (and I know you don't mean it like that, but this is how it comes across) "I'd be fine with the wars if the Israeli death toll was higher/equal to the Gazan one."

And here's why -

EVERY government is supposed to value "our civilians" over "their civilians." It comes free with government. Citizens of a country get certain rights and benefits by paying into the contract (taxes) which is reciprocated by the government.

OUR Israeli government (and my taxpayer dollars) pay to make sure our civilians are safer. Legally, every apartment needs to have a safe room. Post Oct 7th, they adjusted the law, and now, not only do new buildings need to have safe rooms, they also must have bathrooms. We are paying for the value of our lives.

During the past Iran wars (and even on Oct 7th!) the government placed temporary shelters all over the country, since not everyone has access to safety in the event of a missile attack.**

Hamas, Gazans, Islamists. DO NOT DO THE SAME.

They believe that their civilians (gazans) matter less than ours (israelis).

Rather than, ya know. building shelter for the civilians who will be affected after they start one more war, the government of gaza spends their money on increasing Jew murdering capabilities (see above!!).

In fact, they actively work toward ending up with more dead palestinians, because they know the world will flip out when they can blame it on us (see - the fucking past 78 YEARS! how many events have been blamed on us when it's just islamist propaganda???? every hospital in gaza, the "flour massacre," random pictures of syrian wars being claimed as if it is current and from now, and on and on)

More dead palestinians is a worthwhile result, on the off chance that israel/jews will suffer for it in some way (injuring a jew, court of public opinion, etc)

This is NOT our fault NOR our ISSUE.

Obviously, yes, we can and DO mitigate unnecessary death where we can*** (knock bombs, evacuation warning, etc), which is never a 100% success rate for ya know, obvious reasons!

BUT, it can not be our responsibility to put more of our lives at risk just because they refuse to protect their own. That's fucking ludicrous.

And B. which is also a belief antithetical to your western mind, Jews actually do not believe in being murdered just because someone wants us to be. We have an ancient saying "הבא להרגך, השקם והרגו" someone who is coming to kill you, get up and kill him. We do not value turning the other cheek. We value doing what we can to protect our lives when faced with murderers.

When regardless, palestinians will suffer. WE do not have to be killed to "even it out" or whatever the fuck you are implicitly saying. I will remind you of the Golda Meir quote - "If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image."

So no, we will never value our lives less than than their innocents, because doing so gets us killed.

with the correct figures.

Which is only because we value our lives, while they don't.

I think most people would hear about these figures

I genuinely don't give a fucking shit what "most" people think. I care about if I am doing the right thing to protect myself and what is moral for us, regardless of what the world - who has a truly wonderful track record of caring about dead Jews - thinks.

And the only way someone can think this, is if they do not understand the actual situation on the ground, or what a fucking war is.

and at the very least feel some big Yikes

I think we all feel a big Yikes. It's sad. It's awful.

about israel’s choices.

IT'S ALSO NOT JUST ISRAEL. Just because people are fucking racist and want to blame everything on the jews israel does not make it so. I assure you, the 2 million people in gaza also have autonomy! They also make decisions. And, most of their decisions? are made so they'll die, on the off chance that a Jew will also.

When talking about the ratio, what I meant was: it's easy for an outsider to look at that and leap to "whoa, ONE of these two is the bully." If we're talking about what *I* think, I think human life is infinite and distilling it down to ratios is throwing away the fact that every single one is a tragedy beyond measure. And I'm sorry about this, I have a habit of stepping in and out of my point of view a lot while I think things through, and I don't always delineate well when I've done that.

(Some of this comes with the territory: I have spent a truly humongous amount of time working with justifying and understanding acts that are actually criminal, as part of my job, and also lawyers tend to just take positions and argue them for fun kind of constantly in everyday conversation with each other.)

As always, being human is an endless process of iterating my communicative skills...

Genuinely, I apologize for my inadequate signaling and also thank you for sharing your point of view on this. I think we will probably always differ in general on our feelings of protectiveness towards our country's people -- which makes perfect sense, because Americans in general are not under fire in any way that is meaningful in my day to day life. I am not under fire except in the ways I consciously have chosen to be by becoming a public defender.

--------------------------------

When talking about the ratio, what I meant was: it's easy for an outsider to look at that and leap to "whoa, ONE of these two is the bully."

Yes, which is the exact issue I am talking about. And most of these people not only happily jump to that conclusion, they also refuse to examine and understand more that it's not that simple

If we're talking about what *I* think, I think human life is infinite and distilling it down to ratios is throwing away the fact that every single one is a tragedy beyond measure

Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.

Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.

The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.

Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.

At first, McKayla didn’t care that her boyfriend worked for Instacart. He had just finished college, after all, and she was in her senior year, busy writing papers and trying to figure out her adult life. But once McKayla landed a full-time job as a reporter at a local newspaper, just a few months after graduating, she started to see things differently. She moved into her own studio apartment and still found the time to freelance for extra cash. Meanwhile, he was living at home with his parents and in no rush to put his economics and history degree to use. “I would send him links to jobs every couple of weeks and he wouldn’t open them,” she said. “He just wasn’t motivated to find anything.” She picked up the bill when they went out to dinner and bought them tickets to see Chris Rock and Bill Maher (the latter, she says, was her boyfriend’s choice). Sometimes she’d help him deliver other people’s groceries during their date nights.

Since the dawn of paychecks, women have made less than men. But while the overall wage gap persists, some Gen-Z women are living through a more hopeful reality. They are ten points more likely than men their age to get a college degree and are more likely than their male peers to find work once they graduate. While pink-coded jobs in therapy and health care are growing at record-high rates, there have been hiring dips in traditionally male-dominated fields like tech, finance, and blue-collar trades like construction and plumbing. A few years ago, a Pew study found that in a handful of cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., young women are actually earning more than their male peers. With that extra money they are also buying almost twice as many homes as young men and saving for retirement at higher rates. Women of this generation are more likely than any other time in history to date a man who makes less than them — or who makes nothing at all.

Young men, I assumed, must be humiliated by this state of affairs, their masculinity in tatters. But for the most part, they seem comfortable with being pampered and paid for — maybe a little too comfortable. On TikTok, they call their girlfriends “mommies” and refer to themselves as “sugar babies.” “My girl makes more than me, and it’s awesome,” one guy told me. “She’ll be buying me all the fancy tools I want,” said another. I recently came across a Reddit post by a 23-year-old who wasn’t sure how he felt about making less than his girlfriend. All the commenters told him to get over it. “Bro just love your girl, and do what you can,” one said. “If she’s taking you with her on the trips, you’re gucci.”

Women are less thrilled about being treated like ATMs. Men, they say, are in their “princess era.” “I feel like when I go out with a guy that I need to show up with flowers and I need to open his car door,” said one woman. “Like, ‘Anything for you, princess!’” Things are so dire that on TikTok, women are lip-syncing to a new country song about how “If those fairy tales were re-written today / The tramp would wine and dine the lady / And then he’d make her pay.” “All the girls in my life are investing in real estate, they’re making ‘fuck you’ money in sales, they run a business,” one woman said in a car confessional. “And all the guys that we meet our age are just not.” The women I spoke to don’t mind being breadwinners. But they feel like babysitters too.

Naomi’s worst fear was turning into her boyfriend’s mother. But in truth, the 24-year-old paid for everything, helped him with his résumé, and made sure he was looking for jobs. He reassured her that he’d make some changes, like going to therapy and showing up on time when they hung out. Instead, things got worse. While she cobbled together a six-figure income working two retail jobs, he talked about applying to law school while lying in bed at her apartment on the Upper East Side, watching Reels on his phone.

It wasn’t a big deal that he couldn’t buy Naomi dinner at Le Veau d’Or. But she didn’t like how he used money as an excuse to shirk basic responsibilities. He never planned dates and didn’t even get her a birthday present. “If you can’t afford something, write me a love letter,” she says. “He could have literally made me Kraft mac and cheese.” They talked about moving in together, but Naomi couldn’t justify the cost. “If I wanted to finance a human being,” she says, “I’d have a kid.”

But perhaps the most enraging part of their now-finished relationship is that Naomi’s boyfriend used politics to justify his apathy. He considered himself a communist, read Marx in his spare time, and was part of a friend group full of other jobless men who found it embarrassing to care about work. “They hate the finance bro,” Naomi says, “But in their push to reject that, they’re now doing nothing.” McKayla, who requested a pseudonym along with the other women in this story, has clocked a similar phenomenon. She says her boyfriend and his friends are “super-granola crunchy liberals” who see striving for power as anti-feminist. They want to separate themselves from predatory CEOs and men on the right who think women are working pretend “email jobs” and shouldn’t even have the right to vote. “They think treating women respectfully cannot exist with being a hyperambitious provider,” she says. “They think if you make six figures, you’ll suddenly wake up and hate women.”

One 27-year-old, who describes himself as a “modern leftist,” says that he and his friends are more concerned with finding jobs that align with their values than with getting rich. “A lot of the women I know are hyperambitious,” he says. “A lot of the men they date are not.” I heard from one guy who said that while he has no problem with his partner making more money than him, he always tries to pay in public, lest a barista judge him for “taking advantage of his girlfriend.” Another man, whose girlfriend earns twice as much as him, told me he provides in other ways: His work-life balance means he has the “emotional availability” to comfort his girlfriend when she comes home from a stressful day at work. “I’m a caretaker to some degree,” he says. “What I bring to the relationship is arguably not traditionally masculine, but it is fulfilling and valuable.”

The women I spoke with had a different definition of “valuable.” While their boyfriends struggled to chip in for groceries, they also seemed strangely reticent to contribute in other ways — like, you know, doing the dishes or handling the laundry. Jessica couldn’t seem to escape this kind of guy. A few years ago, while the then-19-year-old juggled an engineering internship with a part-time job, she dated someone who was supposedly in the process of applying to med school. Not only did Jessica pay for everything, she organized all their dates as well. “I would buy the candles, do all the cooking, pick the music, and pick a time,” she says. “All he had to do was show up.” More than once she heard him boast to his friends that he didn’t have to worry about money because “Jessica’s such a mommy.” At the club, he’d ask her to flirt with single guys to score free drinks. She broke up with him right before graduating from college and soon started dating a fellow engineering classmate who talked a big game about getting a corporate job. “At that point I was like, ‘I just want someone who will pay for things sometimes,’” Jessica says. “He was like, ‘Don’t worry, baby girl, I’ll take care of you.’” Then he moved back into his parents’ place while complaining about how tough the job market was.

She worked long hours at her consulting job and still picked up the bill when he felt like having a $300 meal (“he had expensive taste,” she says). “I was again trapped in this role of planning activities and doing chores because he would say he ‘didn’t have the capacity,’” Jessica says. “At a certain point it felt like there’s nothing this guy is adding to my life that I can’t just provide for myself.” She dumped him, too, and found a new man who, despite making less money than her, at least brings something to the table. Now that Jessica is getting her master’s degree while running a group focused on educating people about climate change, she needs help getting the rest of her life together. Her boyfriend recently quit his job to go back to school and spends his free time driving her to work events, booking her yoga classes to help her relax, and packing her leftover pasta for lunch. “He’s like, ‘You’re going to change the world,’’’ she says. “‘So I need to help you do that.’”

McKayla resents her boyfriend’s nonchalance. As someone who didn’t have money growing up, she’s clawed her way toward a quality of life she refuses to give up. Her boyfriend, who was raised in an upper-middle-class suburb, is not as forward thinking. When they spoke about moving in together, he told McKayla he has only $1,000 in savings. “I was like, ‘Oh, he isn’t taking this seriously,’” she says. “He just thought that he would somehow come up with the money we need for first and last months’ rent and a security deposit.” When she talked about sending their future children to an Ivy League school, he responded, “Why would we do that?” “I just wish he would exhibit more hunger,” she says. “I know what I could do with the leg up he has, and he just sits on it.”

For many young women, ambition doesn’t feel like a choice. If they want careers that pay the bills, they can’t afford to lay around, putting off job applications and 401(k) contributions while bragging about their perfect politics. They need to buckle down, fast. While it might seem like their boyfriends are lagging far behind, they’ll probably catch up anyway. Historically, the wage gap tends to be narrowest before the age of 35; it gets much wider later on, especially after women have kids. While fathers tend to get a pay bump, women make half as much as they did before becoming mothers. It’s one thing to pick up the tab for your boyfriend who’s genuinely struggling to find work. It’s another to subsidize rent for a guy who spends leisurely afternoons on the couch because he has a feeling that, eventually, he’ll get what he wants.

At least McKayla’s not going to wait for her boyfriend to get himself together. “If the New York Times called me tomorrow and was like, ‘Can you move here in 48 hours,’ I don’t even think I would tell him,” she says. “I would just do it.”

One part of the protests are Traditional Indigenous Owners wanting to visit sacred sites and rock art within the exclusion zone.

The other part is the Free Palestine Omni-cause, which somehow involves conspiracy theories about a joint military installation in the centre of Australia.

Pine Gap is home to a CIA base and satellite communications equipment. It is subject to similar conspiracy theories as Area 51, when the simple answer is "it's a good place for the ground based portion of spy satellite operations, because it's in the dead centre of a very peaceful continent... Making it very hard to attack".

you might have big scars that stretch out. they might be jagged or puffy. they might never even out with your skin tone. you might have a wonky nipple.

my scars are like this after over 8.5 years. and i have never once regretted top surgery and have learned that my scars don’t need to be #Aesthetic to be loved by me. i still pass. i don’t have gender dysphoria related to my chest anymore. getting top surgery was one of the best decisions i’ve ever made.

I won't say that they'll disappear, most of us prone to heavy/keloid scars know that they take a very very long time to reduce, but it made the scars far easier to manage. You are not excluded from being able to get surgery if you're prone to worse scarring, you just may need extra care afterwards.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

You do not know what kind of rant demon you are summoning by opening this subject, but I love you for it.

I think your instinct is right on.

A lot of us are now familiar with the potential psychiatric diagnosis of "complex PTSD." Where current definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder focus on a single event taking place to cause the symptoms, with complex PTSD the diagnosis would encompass multiple events, long-term situations, and cumulative stress.

There was a time when I found the DSM's resistance to a diagnosis of "complex PTSD" to be fairly puzzling. It seems pretty readily apparent that long-term exposure to trauma creates a different thing than PTSD. I think the book The Body Keeps the Score is also pretty troubled about this, because what the author uncovered in a whole lot of pathologized people was a whole fucking lot of child abuse.

(Literally this seems to even have been a problem with Sigmund Freud; a current prominent theory says that his whole Oedipal Complex thing was a way to deliberately disregard the evidence of his female patients' sexual abuse.) (Link is to Wikipedia article.)

I also see kids with these absolute parades of diagnoses. IED, ODD, BPD, ADHD, depression, anxiety. Label after label after label. Dig even slightly under the surface, and you find: that child is... being raised by their grandparents! Adopted and abused in the first two years of life! Father in prison! Mom in prison! A morsel of meat being shredded between two vengeful parents in a horrible divorce! Problems suddenly started after a series of suspicious happenings with an older cousin! Constantly on marijuana! Subject to constant verbal abuse by stepmom! Witnessed one parent beating another on the reg! Take your pick.

A truly astonishing amount of the time, I end up feeling very strongly that the child should be diagnosed with "having a completely understandable reaction to genuinely horrible shit." It's hard not to start thinking "wow this all seems fake" when you get a kid with yet another arm-length dissertation of alphabet diagnoses and ONCE AGAIN you find the heinously obvious reasons behind them.

(Same with my adult clients, who have essentially fossilized versions of the same disorders. More likely to see bipolar and borderline, more likely to see schizophrenic.)

Ah, you say, Ryann, but what about the whole neurotransmitter thing? Depression is caused by low neurotransmitters, we've got that kind of cracked.

Actually, there are "huge bodies of evidence" showing that low serotonin in particular has no causal link to depression and that the affect on serotonin might not be (probably isn't?) why antidepressants even fucking work! (Best evidence: SSRIs and SNRIs work on neurotransmitters immediately, but take weeks or months to kick in to be effective against depression. Why?)

For a long time, I hung my hat on schizophrenia, actually. It's like, genetic, right? Surely we know things about schizophrenia. Surely that is real science. Surely that isn't just a response to trauma!

Well, um. You can have genetic and environmental things that predispose you to schizophrenia, but actually, as my therapist informed me, it tends to actually show up when there's a history of trauma.

This has led to me feeling pretty strongly that the DSM's method of diagnosis is wrong from jump.

Metaphor with me for a moment about the DSM and its diagnostic methods.

Now we all know of the diagnosis of Stuffynose, correct? It's when your nose is stuffy. It's an ailment that's pretty common. Most adults experience Stuffynose several times in their lifetime. There are two main treatments for Stuffynose. The first is antihistamines; the second is decongestants. Doctors are very divided as to the uses of these two medications. Studies show that both of them are more effective than placebo in the treatment of Stuffynose. If antihistamines work, you might have to be on them for the rest of your life. If decongestants work, you're out of luck after a week or two, because they can be dangerous if taken too long. Hopefully that fixes the problem! What? What's a "cold"? What is "flu"? I've never heard of these things. Yes, Stuffynose can sometimes cause a sore throat or coughing. Stuffynose is related to fevers sometimes, but we think that's just an overactive bodily response... Yes, Stuffynose can sometimes be fatal. Listen, the insurance company doesn't cover "surgery" for a "deviated septum" or for "cancer." Likewise, "environmental allergens" aren't something we check for. Thank god we live in the modern world and we've taken care of a lot of the stigma surrounding Stuffynose!

Me. That's me, w/r/t diagnoses of depression and anxiety and frankly most everything else. It's like personality quizzes. If you divide people by any quality and then make that quality a Category, you've created an Identity, not (not just?) a diagnosis. If everyone who likes candy and reads a lot of books is a Sweetreader, you'll now have a whole lot of people identifying as a Sweetreader and being like "omg trying to pass by the Nerds gummy clusters without buying any... #SweetreaderLife" while the Meatjocks are out there having a cookout, typical #meatjock behavior! Obviously DSM diagnoses are much more specific than my Sweetreader/Meatjock dichotomy but I think the tendency is very much there. So here's the thing. I don't think the reluctance of the DSM to acknowledge complex PTSD is puzzling anymore. I think there might be some people there who, overtly or subconsciously, recognize that they are playing Barbies with fake words and fake diagnoses and fake concepts, and that if they add complex PTSD, the whole party is over.

The minute you add complex PTSD, you are acknowledging that it isn't the individual person that's sick. It's their circumstances. It's society.

It's not a defiant child, it's not an explosive child, it's not a child with baby bipolar disorder but we can't call it yet so we call it something else: it's a child with developmental challenges and unlearned skills (THANK you Ross Greene PhD and your book The Explosive Child), or it's child abuse.

And currently the whole goddamn burden of identifying and dealing with developmental challenges, unlearned skills, and child abuse is on our schools, which are equipped for like 30% of that list. I think there is an absolute epidemic of unnamed child abuse in this country, some of it based on the absolutely predictable results of the war on drugs constantly depriving children of their parents (either through being high, drug-seeking, going to ineffective rehabs, being jailed, or doing fucking terrible things because of the shit they're in up to their neck or how much brain damage they've inflicted on themselves). The rest is screens and devices being heinously bad for neurological development (children must be SPOKEN TO in order to turn into people in a developmentally appropriate way!!) and constant parental supervision taking away all opportunities to learn self-sufficiency, self-regulation, and problem-solving.

So of course we pay teachers handsomely to help us raise the next generation of good citizens with so many disadvahahahAHAHAHA AGHHHHHH

So I dream of a day that we have a different paradigm for diagnosing mental illness entirely. In the novel I work on occasionally, when I have time and brainspace, Martian culture in particular diagnoses by picking out areas of the brain that are under- and over-active and using direct stimulus (like a far more advanced version of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a process I have actually undergone myself to unbelievably cool results) they will help the brain strengthen itself.

There is also some good news about antidepressants: the way they work might be in enhancing neuroplasticity, giving the brain more flexibility to heal itself. That's really cool and interesting to me, because it's like -- humans found ways to unlock our own powers of building ourselves and our identities and it fucking?? works???