Our Collapsing Civilization

[Mongrel]

I think it's sort of interesting that for most of human history, the idea of will and other emotions directly affecting your life was taken as pretty much a medical fact (insofar as medical "science" existed). For most of a century, after medical science exploded and actually became useful (i.e. from about the Victorian period on), science never quite denied that, but shoved it down as far as it could to ignore it. It came out in things like the placebo effect, or emotional reactions as a stressor, or in other odd places, but the conception of the body as a machine really took over and dominated. Ideas that an otherwise healthy person might simply die because they had lost the will to live weren't entire dismissed, but doctors would sort of laugh nervously and say something like "Well, I'm sure there were psychological factors, but..." and look for a more mundane cause.

Now, in the last generation, the science is sort of coming back full circle to older ideas about the huge role of willpower and other mental/emotional factors in our lives, stuff that directly affects our lifespans and health. Because the brain is still so poorly understood, the scientific community is still struggling at times to say exactly what impacts those factors have, but the fact that they do, that they're massively important, and there's nothing 'magical' or unscientific about them, is pretty much accepted again.

[Brantly B.]

I think modern medicine would use the term "stress-related disease" to describe this without feeling any need to qualify it. They're not talking about anything different, it's just defined in terms of the effect rather than the cause.

[Caithness]

Is is Seasonal Affective Disorder due to living at hight latitudes, or is it more of a genetic predisposition that affects people even if they live in another country?

[Classic]

For a minute there, I thought you were a spamboat.

[Mongrel]

Russians don't live at particularly high latitudes though.

SAD is a known psycho-cultural thing among Scandinavians. Obviously they have older, less-scientific names for it - for instance, I know the Norwegians refer to the long winter dark that causes trouble as "Morketiden" (literally "Murky Time"), for whatever that's worth.

[Mongrel]

Two NYPD officers shot dead by a "revenge"-seeking loon, shooter kills himself.

Dude was on a rampage that started with him killing his girlfriend in Baltimore, then going to to NY with the specific aim of murdering NYPD officers, supposedly out of rage over all the police shootings which have been discussed for months. Of course the two weren't even white, they were visible minorities - because what else could this asshole do to be more of a wretchedly stupid fuck?

[Mongrel]

People are getting really classy about the NYPD shooting.

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/12/20/ ... nypd-cops/



and



By which I mean, holy crap, fuck these assholes.

[Thad]

Christ, Pataki, I don't even USE Twitter and I know the difference between a hash and an at sign.

[Mongrel]

I guess this could go into a lot of different threads.

Wow, right off the bat House GOP is going after Social Security:

Buried in the new rules that the House Republican majority plans to adopt for the 114th Congress is a provision that could threaten Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries — a group of severely impaired and vulnerable Americans — with a sudden, one-fifth cut in their benefits by late 2016. The provision bars the House from replenishing the DI trust fund simply by shifting some payroll tax revenues from Social Security’s retirement trust fund.

http://www.offthechartsblog.org/house-r ... ficiaries/

That would probably matter a lot to my mother-in-law, who's in a care home entirely funded by her Social Security/Disability.

Like, here it is, cartoonishly evil Snidely Whiplash shit. I'm sure the Democrats will completely fail to capitalize or even stop this in any meaningful way as per usual.

[Mongrel]

Soooo Paris shootings.

This will have some fallout, I imagine. Not sure what yet.

[Joxam]

I don't really know what I'm trying to say and although it should be self evident I will first say that I don't think it deserved the violence, murder and terror it recieved. And the only reason I'm even saying anything now is because this has caused my social media feeds to be filled with comics from Charlie Hebdo and because I don't read French satirical publications this is the first exposure I've had to them, but holy shit those comics were racist, sexist and homophobic at their worst. Now again, no excuse for the shootings. Obviously that response was insane.

[Smiler]

Yup, they were really shitty comics.

[Thad]

From what I hear from a friend who lived there for a year or two, France really is as xenophobic as it's commonly depicted, and particularly ugly toward Arabs and/or Muslims.

I've gotta figure there are a lot of members of those minorities in France who are pretty pissed off at the killers for reinforcing all the things the bigots believe about them.

Bleeding Cool has a good collection of tweets from people in the comics industry.

Don't read the comments.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, 'fraid the stereotype about French bigotry is mostly true. It's true for much of Europe, but France has it a fair bit more.

The reality is that those Charlie Hebdo comics aren't really that far off mainstream (I don't know well enough to say just how close they are).

[François]

There is a non-insignificant proportion of the French population that believes Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité is for white dudes only, and there is a chunk of media industry devoted to them, of which CH is definitely a part. But in the end, defending their right to spew their garbage is how we prove that we are better than they are. Protecting the free speech of the people who say things we agree with is really no great feat; it's our reaction to the death of our ideological opponents that is the litmus test of our own philosophy.

(Not that I'm saying any of us are dancing on their graves of course. And it would definitely be better if they went away or were made irrelevant. Just... not by being shot by extremists.)

[Thad]

Oh hell yes. I'm sure we're all aware of the relevant not-actual-Voltaire quote.

Bigots should be marginalized, criticized, mocked, protested, boycotted, shunned. When people exercise their right to be assholes, you should exercise your right to call them assholes.

But people who actually go around murdering people for drawing cartoons they don't agree with are much, much bigger assholes.

[Joxam]

Yeah, no one should get murdered because they're a bigot.

[Thad]

ComicsAlliance has a good roundup of political cartoons responding to the attack.

Once again, don't read the comments.

[Thad]

Response from Joe Sacco; rebuttal from Ruben Bolling.

I think they both make some good points -- Bolling, in particular, notes that it's not always easy to tell who the target of satire is, especially if it's in a foreign language, and that one of the cartoons that's been used as an example of bigotry was actually intended at the expense of bigots (think of that New Yorker cover in 2008 that depicted the Obamas as terrorists, and the shocking number of people who didn't realize it was making fun of the "scary secret Muslim" meme, not reinforcing it).

And then a piece from Scalzi.

All via Tom Tomorrow.

We could probably use a threadsplit, when you guys get a minute.

[Blossom]

Mmm, yeah, protect that powerful French commitment to freedom of speech.