“Get 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. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’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. There’s a really interesting human example I’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 it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’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 you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—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.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

i hope i think of this video in the last moments before i die

“Some things could only be written in a foreign language; they are not lost in translation, but conceived by it. Foreign verbs of motion could be the only ways of transporting the ashes of familial memory. After all, a foreign language is like art—an alternative reality, a potential world. »

All I can think abt is that one quote that basically just describes that you can’t be your true self in your native language bc there’s too much emotional attachment, but that second languages allow speakers to be truly free with their words

- Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky”

“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, it first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”

- Love in Translation by Lauren Collins from the New Yorker, August 8 & 15, 2016

tbh I will never roll my eyes at corporate queer stuff because I remember when there was a huge spate of suicides of queer children because they thought they’d never be accepted, and that it’d never get better.

like, as I said in the tags

yeah. corporations just want our money.

but here’s the thing: once upon a time, they didn’t. they didn’t sell to us. they were just as greedy but we were so beneath them they didn’t want money if it came from us. they asked us to leave the store. they refused to bake cakes for us. they refused to rent or sell us housing. a lot of queer kids were made homeless or DIED because they thought it’d always be that way, that the world would always hate us.

corporations being sluts for our money, and openly showing the homophobes that they prefer our money over theirs, is a GOOD THING and a sign of progress and I will die on that hill.

absolutely support small businesses and indies. but Jesus don’t flat out refuse to give money to a corporation for celebrating pride, because that’s what the homophobes literally want people to do and in this dystopic society you (and I’m dying inside as I say this) NEED corporations on your side because of the sheer scale of their influence. WE NEED THAT INFLUENCE.

use corporations as mercilessly as they use us. none of this purity bullshit. I’ll be the first in line to help strip them of their power, but they’re letting the homophobes know that that age is dying, and that has power.

All this was less than 15 years ago. Please keep that in mind.

Exactly!

Some of it is even more recent. The epidemic of queer children suicides hitting the news? That was last decade. It’d been going on for much longer than that but at one point our fight had progressed enough the media started reporting on it and the suicides even went up for a while, and I was on tumblr when that happened, that’s how recent it is.

So how can I sneer at corporations showing support widely when kids dying used to be normal?

I can’t even fully attribute the motivations corporations rainbowing up their logo as completely for money. There’s probably queer people who put their jobs on the line and fought for the company to DO that.

So whenever I see someone going “UGH the corporations are pandering to us again”?

that’s

that’s a good thing!!!! how is that NOT a good thing???

learn your history, talk to your queer elders – some of us have been fighting twenty years or longer and for many of us this is a sign that we are winning, and that a decades-long fight is paying off!

Reblogging to add an addendum to clarify, since related stuff has been cropping up on my dash and I feel this post isn’t complete without addressing it:

If a company is rainbowing their logo up but doing homophobic shit behind closed doors, the answer is not for them to stop rainbowing up their logo, but to stop doing the homophobic shit.

If they’re doing homophobic shit absolutely call that crap out.

me, holding my thumb over my laptop’s power button: do you need a time out or are you done

(sitting in court on trial for murder) wow. god forbid women do anything

im easily distracted

this post hasn't left my mind since i've first saw it

people jest but this is literally how i worked out i was gaslit for like 15 years of my life

People who “want trauma” are recognizing, on some level, that they were traumatized but in a way that’s not “socially recognized” as trauma. What they really want is for people to see that they’ve been traumatized and be on their side

Hold up

I think it’s also important to talk about mental illness, and how the pain and trauma of being mentally ill as a kid is often diminished because of the lack of outside actors. If you spent your childhood being suicidally depressed because your wee little kiddo brain decided to be a chemical shitshow, it doesn’t matter how much mom and dad loved you, that kinda thing fucks you up. And having people only look at your external surroundings and argue that “nothing bad happened” ignores all the pain you went through internally. So wishing you could have something external you could point to in order to justify that pain and enduring stress -- just so people could understand -- makes sense.