domain:asteriskmag.com
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
The conditions for asylum require a specific threat, not a general atmosphere of high crime rates or a punitive justice system with few rights. If this guy was a left wing journalist or a member of the communist party or whatever then he has a specific threat given that Pinochet was suppressing them. If there’s an off-chance that he gets arrested for no reason then that’s not a specific threat.
Otherwise everyone who lives in Japan, Singapore, or other countries with few rights of the accused is eligible for asylum. They’re not.
Again, thé claim is not ‘no bad thing could ever happen in Pinochet’s chile that would not happen on the USA’. It’s ’there is no reason to think the bad things that happened under Pinochet would happen to him in particular’.
oats_son
7hr ago
how you would see it?
You're right, this is pretty specific to my location: I live in a very small town and the sight lines are pretty long, so depending on the direction, I can tell if someone's headed my way for quite a distance. I also happen to drive around sometimes and see the same people doing the same things (the list was meant to be for habitual actions). If I know what someone's start point is, I can determine their walk round-trip is about a mile and potentially find it exceptional because basically no one walks in the area unless they're exercising, generally outdoorsy, own a pet, have a DUI, have no driver's license, are a minor who likes to go places, are a minor who is a street urchin with no place to go, are poor, or any combination. That alone might not tell you much, but you could combine it with other indicators to tell you more.
wayfarer
7hr ago
The argument is particularly strange when the book is literally choosing to draw its own cover.
writers in many cases do not get to choose covers and in some were extremely disappointed with what publisher did to their book
though I am not fan of this saying either
wayfarer
7hr ago
Walking a significant distance to and from the location
how you would see it?
- Visiting the location multiple times in one night
- Visiting the location alone
- Visiting the location with their wife and all 7 of their kids
- Buying lots
- Talking a lot
- Talking very little
- Making good eye contact
- Making little eye contact
- Slurring their words
- Having proper diction
- Talking to other coincidental visitors (strangers to you) at the location
heavily depends on a location (for each I think I can imagine location where given thing would be entirely normal or indication of horrible life choices or worse)
- Buying little
how it can be weird/problem?
Gaashk
7hr ago
It sounds like the supposed communist wants to be a homeschool mom, once the kids are a bit older, and with a denser community than is usual nowadays.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before.
Ragpicker and seamstress are jobs that exist in capitalist society. They aren’t exactly a good living, but you can go do them. You’ll just live in poverty.
wayfarer
7hr ago
Go to a tattoo convention
that is going to select for people with tattoo obsession/fascination
Tattoos are a way of giving a piece of your body, permanently to a tattooist. He is literally branding your body, and it is permanent.
wait, people are getting tattooed without selecting what they will get?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8hr ago
A person with dental hygiene bad enough that he lost an entire tooth
Might also have just had an accident. Or lost a fight.
Stellula
8hr ago
Tattoos are a way of giving a piece of your body, permanently to a tattooist. He is literally branding your body, and it is permanent.
This is a disgusting form of submissive behavior.
Granted there are situations where a tattoo is designed by the recipient and the “artist” is passive, but those are rare.
To make this point: NONE of the art that tattooist brand their donors with would be in any way notable or memorable if it was simply put to canvas. The “art” is the act of convincing somebody to donate their body to this. It’s notable because “I have permanently disfigured my body with this”, but that’s the only reason why. It’s also why tattoos have gone through a progression from a simple bicep tattoo, to full sleeves, chest plates for women, face tattoos, and in the most “interesting” cases, a full blackout of the donors body parts.
Go to a tattoo convention and you won’t see small artistic things (if you could call them that) getting attention or notoriety, you’ll see the treadmill increasingly self destructive things. It’s why tattooism is adjacent to other “body mod”/mutilation cultures, and the further into tattoos you go, the more you converge with the mutilation side.
(To be clear, I have tattoos, I don’t regret them, they are my own design. I just recognize this behavior for what it is)
wayfarer
8hr ago
And also for anyone who would be falsely accused. (not familiar how often it was happening under Pinochet, though I bet that "never" is not the answer)
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
To be clear, full citizenship in European towns was both hereditary and could be earned. It’s reasonable to point to this as some level of generational social mobility.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8hr ago
Let's say you're walking to your workplace or your university class or your school and you see, purposely avoiding anything like a bumper sticker or T-shirt that makes any more clearly identifiable statement or symbol:
- A man or woman with dyed blue hair
- A man or woman with a mohawk
These appearance choices are not ugly (in my personal aesthetic opinion), but unfortunately at this point they are strongly linked to objectionable opinions, so I am forced to assume that the person has those opinions.
- A man or woman with a septum piercing
- A man wearing sagging pants that show his underwear
This appearance choice is both ugly (in my personal aesthetic opinion) and linked to objectionable opinions.
- A man wearing suspenders
- A man wearing no suspenders, no belt, and wearing tight pants (this was me in high school)
- A woman wearing suspenders
A somewhat weird person who likes outdated fashion and refuses to bow to modern sensibilities
- A man with golden teeth
A person with dental hygiene bad enough that he lost an entire tooth
- A white man or woman with dreadlocks
This appearance choice is ugly (in my personal aesthetic opinion) but not linked to objectionable opinions.
- A man chewing tobacco
- A woman chewing tobacco
An addict
Or perhaps we could change the context of how you're seeing this person. Let's say you work at a gas station or other commonly-visited public-facing third place and you see people:
I think this example is too location-specific to be useful.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
No, ‘they’ did not take this from us. Obesity and low birthrates are not a Jewish plot, even if mass migration might be.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Old farts wear them. They’re pretty common in little-boy church clothes type outfits- you know, the ones moms think are cute on toddlers for the five minutes before they get ruined.
DelendaEst
8hr ago
Ok so you're an employer and you see an employee of yours on the internet in front of millions saying things that you view as disgusting and horrible and that you don't want in your business. Are you only allowed to fire them if they mention your company during it?
It is already illegal to do so for at least some categories of things, ie if an employer finds homosexuality or interracial relationships or conservative islam disgusting they can sit and spin and are not allowed to fire you. I just think that saying "I can fire you for violating my values but you cannot fire me for violating yours" is not a sustainable situation.
Bartender_Venator
8hr ago
The uncanny valley depiction of foreign cultures is one of the funniest things in Jojo. Wait till you get to the second half of Part 1 (set just before WWII, plenty of wacky Nazis) and to Part 4 (set in a Japanese tourist's dream of Italy). Generally JJBA takes all the things that make shounenslop unwatchable - incredibly long fights, painstaking descriptions of each attack, powerscaling, ridiculous poses, flat characterization, corny villains, etc. - and dials it up so far it becomes amazing even if you normally hate that stuff.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
and even less so in most large cities.
Rural areas aren’t any less tattooed than urban ones.
The Rabbit Hole
How it started:
I am homeschooling my 7 year old daughter, A, this year. I do not want to homeschool her forever - I have concerns about her socialiszation. But her behavior at school last year in the first grade grew to be atrocious and counter to learning anything.
She was sent to the office almost every day for running away from her teacher and hiding in the art cabinets or alternatively chasing and grabbing at her teacher (if the teacher took something from her.) There weren't any clear triggering events, but a oftentimes it would be that there was an assignment shift, the teacher would tell her to put away the old work and focus on the lesson or some new work, and then it would set my daughter off. We had her evaluated with a neuropsychologist and have a formal diagnosis of ADHD, for which the accommodations are to give her less work or more time to do some work. This didn't really help.
Close to the end of the year, the principle, vice principle, teacher, school psychologist, and like five other people had a meeting with us where they discussed A's behavior. My husband and I were seriously worried they were going to expel her or at the very least hold her back a year. (She had been suspended twice from school already.) Instead, after going down the litany of behaviors that was causing disruption to her learning, they just looked at my husband and I and asked us what they should do. It was a shocking moment to me - these were the experts! Had they never seen a kid like ours before? If they had told us, "You need to do x at home, get her evaluated for this other behavioral disorder" etc, we'd have done it! We're demonstrably involved middle class parents who can afford to take her to therapy every other week and see whatever doctors are needed.
I'm focusing on A's behavior at school largely because that was what caused us to pull her out of school. Her behavior at home has also been laughably bad. I've had moments where I considered she might just be what was once called an Imbecile. For example, a little while ago we went for a family walk. She ran into the side of a car backing out of its driveway. She was running ahead of us against our wishes, as normal, and we saw the car backing out so we yelled at her to stop. So of course she ran faster and... Bonk! No injuries fortunately. Stupidest car crash ever.
The thing I need to get across is that A is the sweetest child ever when she's not upset. She is upset at her own behavior and is often praying and wishing she wasn't such a "Bad Kid." She asks to do more chores, she looks out for her younger siblings, she minds her Ps and Qs. But once or twice a day, she will get into a "stuck" mode where she will keep trying to do the same insane thing over and over again and needs to be carried to her closet (full of stuffed animals, we don't even bother putting clothes in there, it's a safe soft place.)
Anyways, we pulled her out of school and I've been hanging around Homeschooling forums. I perk up whenever I see a topic around ADHD, because that at least is one diagnosis she officially has. A couple weeks ago, I saw someone mention that their kid has something called "PDA" and that they have to accommodate that in their homeschooling methods. For the first time in my life, I saw someone else describe a child who acts like A.
What is PDA?
First a disclaimer. PDA seems to be recognized as an expression of Autism in the UK, but it doesn't seem to be recognized anywhere else. I do not wish to make a stand one way or another on if it exists. All I know, is that my kid acts the same as the other kids who are said to have it (and she doesn't really act like any other kid otherwise.)
PDA stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance. The theory is that, when someone with this disorder has a demand placed on them (explicit or implicit) they perceive it as a threat and over time it actually activates their fight/flight/freeze response. This actually explains my daughter's behavior so well it's entirely shocking to me. I've seen her shaking in fear as she struggles to put shoes on her feet for five minutes because I told her, "hurry up, we're going to be late." I already suspected anxiety was involved, but she doesn't act like someone with generalized anxiety. This is the first thing that really makes sense.
What did I do?
First, I looked up supplements to calm a kid down. If most of her misbehavior is caused by improperly triggering her fear response, lets turn the dial down on that. I found L-Theanine and thought it looked interesting. Lots of people who take it say they don't notice anything - it's not a relaxant or a downer. But other people who take it say it makes them more resilient to downward spirals, which is what I'm looking for. It's pretty safe - you can take grams of it without ill effect. Doesn't build up in the system either.
It immediately changed her behavior. When the supplement arrived she was in the middle of a bit of mania, talking about selling crafts nonstop all day and making enough money to buy a diamond (we read A Little Princess recently.) I wasn't able to get her to do anything - eat, practice math or reading, go outside, anything else. She was staying up well past her bedtime. I gave her about 50mg in her water and in thirty minutes she was happy (different from mania, trust me), cuddly, and soon, sleepy.
Since then, I've been giving her some in her water at bedtime and she's only had one of her "stuck" episodes once. On days where I have an outing planned, I give her some in the morning as well and.. it's incredible. Makes me want to cry. We have good days. I can take her places without her running into the road. I can tell her it's time to go back and she doesn't fall to pieces. She acts polite and conscientious and everything that I know her to be. It has been years since I could take her anywhere without having to accept that it will involve a tantrum or two.
The only downside is, when I give her a morning dose, she often reports a headache a few hours later (as it's wearing off?). No big deal, she has had headaches before. I give her ibuprofen and she is fine.
But it doesn't sit right with me
As magical as this all is, it's not like it's in her genes. A Western European did not evolve the need for an extract from an Asian plant in order to avoid running off the nearest cliff.
And the headache bothers me. What if I'm depleting something in her body to give her these good days now, but it will come back to bite us later?
So I kept looking. Most PDA parents talk about changing their entire lifestyle to "accommodate" their PDA kid - just never demand anything from them and set up their lives so that no one else ever demands anything from them. I think this is ridiculous. It's basically consigning the kid to being institutionalized later on. No one can grow into an adult this way. But when A is overloaded with demands, she's not learning either.
I kept looking for keywords surrounding diet and supplements. Finally, I saw someone state, "We resolved pda entirely with a nutrient based approach" and brought up William Walsh. Walsh is a quack without a background in medicine who has diagnosed many ill-behaved children with "Pyroluria" and cured them with large doses of Zinc and vitamin B6. And like, it does actually seem to cure them in the course of a few weeks. Walsh has his own reasons for why he thinks these supplements cure "Pyroluria" and they all seem to be medically wrong. But if it works, it works?
Enter the MTHFR
Googling Walsh's name around, I stumbled upon a Reddit community of people troubleshooting their Vitamin B problems with genetic tests and high doses of supplements. They all have a genetic mutation that makes their bodies less able to process the folate in food into the active form, L-5-MTHF. If they have more folate in their system than they can process, they have a build up of homocystine that causes lots of other bodily functions to gum up. They also aren't making enough L-5-MTHF, which prevents other bodily functions from doing what they should.
There seems to be a correlation between MTHFR mutations and ADHD, Autism, and other disorders.
There are other genetic mutations that can cause issues with B vitamins and the Reddit community is constantly over/undershooting and making themselves over-methylated and under-methylated and it seems very messy. They don't just supplement L-5-MTHF, they also need to reduce folate (which is in most cereals and breads in the United States), supplement B2, B6, B12, zinc, and magnesium, pay attention to if they're supplementing the methylated vs unmethylated versions of these vitamins, and try to keep things in balance.
Those who achieve this balance claim they have found a nirvana free of skin issues, pains, and mental issues that have followed them from childhood. Those who mess up end up with copper deficiency and bouts of schizophrenia.
I have found a Psychiatrist in my state with an actual MD who claims to treat "Nutrient Imbalances, Including Methylation Imbalances" as well as "Abnormalities in Stress Hormone Pathways and Other Hormone Related Root Causes." She is not in my insurance network so it would all be out of pocket but a consultation with her would be within my budget. But I only found her after three layers of quack-searching. This is the medical equivalent of vibe-coding and I realize that.
Is this worth pursuing? Has anyone else fallen down the MTHFR rabbithole?
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
It’s not that tattooing is evil or inexscusable. It is that it is so rarely a good decision that having multiple indicates a person who makes bad decisions on a regular basis.
Obviously there’s a wide spectrum of different kinds of tattoos- there’s tattoos of the Chinese character which the guy at the shop swears means courage(he doesn’t speak Chinese), there’s swastika and drug tattoos, there’s tattoos of Bible verses. I think I will stick to my ‘three or more tattoos- red flag for poor decision making’ rule in all cases, but obviously reserve the right to judge the guy with a face tat of a crack pipe even if he has no other tattoos.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8hr ago
This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended.
Making it too obvious that you think "Things were better back then because black people didn't have access to white beaches" is exactly what I mean by "stepping on a rake".
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8hr ago
This topic came up because I was ranting against Pete Hegseth. The party of family values puts forward this womanizing gruff tattooed washed up Fox News guy.
The party of family values was Bush's GOP. Trump's GOP is different. He's been hiring guys with tattoos since he was a teenager.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Sûre, but this guy wasn’t alleging any specific reason. Reasonable fear of getting targeted is true for communists and those who associate with them.
oats_son
8hr ago
K. Why should anyone care about your personal aesthetic preferences?
I find this flippant. Why should anyone care? Because I'm not the only one and there's an entire wing of politics where people worry about systemic discrimination and think it's a huge problem. We live in a society and interact with other human beings and having those human beings like you can be important.
This topic came up because I was ranting against Pete Hegseth. The party of family values puts forward this womanizing gruff tattooed washed up Fox News guy. If he was someone you could vote for on a ballot, the aesthetic choices he made very well might put me over the edge on not voting for him if I knew what he looked like and nothing else, or if I was on the fence before seeing him. If someone knows that they may be systemically discriminated against for their choices, and does it anyway, okay. But then that would definitely reinforce my choice to trust any given stranger less if they have them, and it's something I have to assume of pretty much anyone who gets them, because the idea that "family values" types dislike them is pretty widespread, I think. If you are comfortable running against "family values", that says a lot! And yes, I understand that may be less true in other places, but it is probably still a little true even in those places.
Both exist, today!
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