It's about malingering and battle fatigue and hysteria and the bizarre lengths to which the medical establishment goes to maintain a social narrative, and it is very good.
There's also a scene in which a guy tackles a lady and forcibly wrests her faux prolapse (fauxlapse) from her rectum, and a guy dies of nostalgia, and it tells you how to make fake polyps out of rooster nards.
This is a really good example of the kind of thing that longform journalism is best at: Taking something that could easily be cast as simple outrage bait and actually explaining how things got the way they did.
This series on domestic violence in South Carolina just won a Pulitzer. It is definitely long, in eight installments, but it's worth the time, I think. (I read the first couple installments yesterday, and just started on the third now when it occurred to me I should post it.)
Not sure if this is long enough to satisfy lisarea's needs, but it looks worthwhile and I haven't had time to finish it so Ima leave it here for laters:
Given the subject of the article it would be churlish of me to mock you for stupidly only noticing too late that it's not really all that long. Also because it's still too long for me.
I am all for mocking stupid people, like 52% of British people, but I'm very keen on angrily mocking and voting out the people who both increased the number of stupid people (by destroying education) and denying people opportunities (by so many means).
I mean, yeah, I mock stupid people too, but it's that ignorance + arrogance type of stupid usually. The sort of thing that causes people to express very strong opinions about things they don't understand. That's not just low IQ, but low barriers to confidence. Like, I don't even know if Trump supporters are actually lower IQ or if they're just intellectually lazy and prone to emotional arguments.
I've probably told this story before because I have been here way too long and am running out of stories I haven't told you yet, but I used to work with this woman who was a little slow. She was perfectly functional and all, but she just had a hard time sometimes grasping complicated or abstract concepts and things like that. But she was really great. She had sort of hit her career ceiling and was happy to stay right where she was, basically doing the things other people considered tedious, like proofreading and filing and organizing things. And she was really good at them. Because she wasn't bored, she didn't fuck up from inattention like bored people do.
And that was fantastic because she was taking a lot of the burden off other people, freeing up their time, and doing a better job at that sort of thing than any of us did. She was really happy with things just the way they were, she didn't have ambitions to move up in the organization or anything, because she loved the job she had already.
And when she told our boss that in her annual review, HE FIRED HER. He fired her for recognizing that her abilities were best suited for the position she already had, and for being happy with things the way they were.
Of course, everyone else was pissed off as hell when we found out, but it was a very tough job market at the time, so we couldn't just up and quit. So we just simmered and everyone hated their jobs a little more after that.
Yes, there's a big difference (in mockworthiness) between anti-intellectual stupid people (which your Repubs seem to have been very keen on creating) and people of simply low intelligence who aren't arrogant about it.
Fine! I will stop calling all of the annoying drivers on the road stupid idiots. I already had to give up lame so as not to insult people with bad legs. I'm just going to have to go with cockwomble from now on.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
The state of American masculinity is in flux as blue-collar jobs vanish. Drew Philp travels the midwest and Appalachia to find out what that looks like