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Aislingeach

@aislingeach88 / aislingeach88.tumblr.com

Mike, 36, NJ.
Black Lives Matter
THIS BLOG:
LGBTQ rights
anti-TERF
ACAB
pro-choice
Free Palestine ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ธ
โ€œGet a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. Itโ€™s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the โ€˜70s and said, โ€œWell, hang on a minute. Weโ€™re putting the rat in an empty cage. Itโ€™s got nothing to do. Letโ€™s try this a little bit differently.โ€ So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, itโ€™s got in Rat Park. Itโ€™s got lovely food. Itโ€™s got sex. Itโ€™s got loads of other rats to be friends with. Itโ€™s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And theyโ€™ve got both the water bottles. Theyโ€™ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But hereโ€™s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they donโ€™t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. Thereโ€™s a really interesting human example Iโ€™ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is itโ€™s a moral failing, youโ€™re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says itโ€™s not your morality, itโ€™s not your brain; itโ€™s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. [โ€ฆ] Weโ€™ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? Weโ€™ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if youโ€™re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuffโ€”in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.โ€

with musk and trump gunning for social security, now seems like a good time to remind everyone that social security isnโ€™t like government charity or something. itโ€™s fully paid for. always has been. corporate media loves to parrot the conservative lie that social security is running out of money without ever mentioning why: congress stole the money. they literally robbed from peter to pay paul.

the whole idea of social security was always that you pay into it your whole life, and then when you retire the government gives you that money back. itโ€™s your money. always has been. like sure technically the money being paid by working age people now is going to the people who are retired now. but social security was started in the 30โ€™s, the people who are collecting benefits now paid into it their whole lives. the idea was to be a retirement savings account that the government keeps safe for you because itโ€™s almost impossible for working class people to save for retirement under capitalism.

the problem is that congress looked at all that money just sitting there and decided to use it as a slush fund. and never paid it back. because itโ€™s easier to steal that money than it is to raise taxes for new spending. so yeah, itโ€™s a problem now that there are more old people retiring than there are young people working, but only because congress stole the money it was supposed to be saving for the people now retiring. all those savings could have actually earned money for the people who canโ€™t pay in due to disability etc by being used as a massive investment fund. instead itโ€™s the classic austerity misdirection: sabotage a useful functional government program, then claim that it doesnโ€™t work and is too expensive. and the media never talks about it.

โ€œHozier is a lesbianโ€ โ€œHozier is a man written by a womanโ€ โ€œHozier is like if a man was raised by lesbian mothersโ€ โ€œHozier is like if a man was a womanโ€ quick give me one reason why a man canโ€™t be soft and gentle and poetic and in love without sounding like a terf or a misogynist

โ€œTheyโ€™re written by a womanโ€ โ€œtheyโ€™re written by a manโ€ is just another way gen z has reinvented gender norms but make it cool and edgy and a little queer and hopefully no one will notice that theyโ€™ve reinvented gender norms and actually are misogynistic

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