saw a magazine article yesterday called something like "how i lost 3 stone without setting foot in a gym" and when i read it i discovered that the secret to her weight loss was... eating under 500 calories a day. girl that's not a diet that's just anorexia

and everyone's like "why are so many girls nowadays developing eating disorders" as if diet culture isn't an entire industry specifically designed to profit off women's misery and dysmorphia and self-hatred. this is the bad place!!!!!

Important!

Y'all are in for a treat 👀 there's so many amazing submissions!

i heard a talk about this by a terrific mystery novelist, John Straley, titled “In Defense of Misanthropes in the Arts.”

I’ll never forget him sharing his candid fear that authors like him, authors who did not want to post on Facebook or Twitter, authors who wanted to be curmudgeonly and left alone, were being steadily squeezed out of the writing world as publishers foisted more and more promotional work directly onto authors.

Not everyone is cut out for the spotlight. Not everyone wants to be their own hype man. Not everyone presents well in 280 characters, especially in a space they don’t even want to be present. The time suck, the scrutiny, the punishment for making a “mistake” -- all this extracurricular work is so different from actual writing.

Make room for weird reclusive shut-in eccentric misanthropic artists and writers. Don’t forget those voices are worth your attention, too.

yes it’s on 4/20 haha go ahead and laugh at the birthday boy.

middle class america is forever in fear of the seal team 6 of rapist drug dealers murderers breaking into their house to get them specifically. what makes you so special?

addiction to true crime podcasts

Obsessed with them showing all of their security measures that could never be used against them ever at all

I hope someone who sees this video gets through every single one of her security measures to do nothing but put an elf on the shelf somewhere and then never return

I have so many questions.

1. If whatever she's afraid of needs that many defense mechanisms against it, what the hell is her husband going to do. Why is she so dramatically much more afraid when her husband isn't home
2. How much did all of this stuff cost
3. How fast could paramedics or firefighters get into the house in an emergency? How fast could she get OUT of the house in an emergency?
4. what is that stupid whistle going to do
5. This is a covert ad for these products isn't it

In all seriousness this is a symptom of one of the most toxic elements of American culture, which is the belief that isolation is more likely to protect you from the danger of other people, than other people are to protect you from the danger of isolation.

Realistically, a medical emergency or house fire is far more likely to occur than being randomly murdered in your own house by a stranger, but this woman "protects" herself from the safety of living in community, thereby exposing herself to the danger of living in isolation.

I'm like, morbidly fascinated to observe how normal American women think it is to fear the entire world. I am American but it's still weird to me how every other woman has a deeply ingrained fear of going for a walk alone and expects me to as well.

I'm also really caught off guard when people say things like "Oh, there might be someone on drugs" about a poor or dilapidated area, as a reason it's dangerous. In my experience, the average American seems to have no idea what "drugs" are or do, only a vague impression that they are somewhat like rabies and cause people to become indiscriminately violent and dangerous towards everyone around them.

At my first college there was a restaurant downtown that everyone said was "a front for human trafficking." Even professors would say this. Despite the widespread nature of this rumor, it never seemed to occur to anyone that this information could be actionable or that any authority could be informed about the presence of a human trafficking ring. It was just a fact; human trafficking networks were an assumed part of the everyday world, something that had to be avoided like potholes in the road.

I think about these things a lot.

It is extremely beneficial for a number of industries, as well as certain politicians, for white people — and this is specific to white people — to believe that they are in life threatening danger at any given minute and it matters. It is critical to understand that this issue is extraordinarily racialized, and that the industries and politicians benefiting from making white people afraid are relying upon existing and worsening racial stratification in the US to fill their coffers, or provide them with power or both, and enjoying the knock on harms this does to the BIPOC, immigrant, unhoused and SUD communities adjacent to these needlessly terrified white folks.

77% of Americans believe that crime is increasing. While we don’t have a race breakdown of the numbers, we do have a political breakdown of the numbers, which is just as good, honestly. 92% of Republicans believe that crime is going up but only 58% of Democrats do.

In reality, every kind of crime has been decreasing for the last several years except auto theft. The murder rate fell between 2022 and 2023 at the steepest rate ever in history, and property crime is at its lowest rate since 1961. 

The most dangerous thing in the world to that woman in the video is the husband she locks herself in with every night.



Closing all your blinds and turning your lights off 24/7 like this is going to increase your chance of break-ins because there are a thousand times more people out there who want to break into your empty house and steal your TV, than people who want to assault a random stranger in their house

But to be fair those same people would probably be deterred by the door locks so it all evens out to a very expensive nothing I guess

My main thought is just….if she leaves, she has to do all these all over again, right?

Unless the point is she never leaves the house while her husband is away….then this just gets a new sickening layer to it.