are there OTHER eugenicist "Simpsons" episodes aside from the "Simpson gene" one? yecch ~Chara

Haha, it's "The Simpsons", it's "satire", but the "joke" is that eugenicism is real and there really is a heritable "dysgenic" factor that leads to inevitable dullness of the brain, but it's not expressed in women so THAT'S good! hilarious!

Fuck that noise.

I couldn't help but notice that the "Simpson gene" supposedly doesn't assert itself until mid-childhood. Homer and Bart (for the purpose of one episode) were supposedly brilliant in early childhood and then got dull-witted, like all the Simpsons men do! Because genes. But I find myself thinking: if there's any likely explanation for kids suddenly seeming to get "stupid" in mid-childhood, it's not gonna be "genes".

~Chara of Pnictogen

I was cogitating earlier about a pattern that you see in right-wing media circles frequently. Most of the propagandists enjoy an individual sort of celebrity, even if they're operating out of some organization.

cw: lengthy discourse on patterns of organization among right-wing propaganda figures, with Charles Murray as a particular example

there's something so forlorn about dollar-store merchandise that I feel aggrieved by it. cheap paper feels so thin these days, like they've figured out how to make it out of the absolute minimum of recycled pulp. and no I'm sorry I've never thought that writing on an electronic tablet was anything like the same and I've had some very tortuous thoughts about why that should be the case that aren't about just...UX issues. directly altering a physical medium is...significant.

I'm so happy that Kel got into those cheap plastic discs from the dollar store. I was a bit worried at first; they seemed a meager sort of gift, but Kel really took to them. I wish I could say that other dollar-store toys looked as promising.

~Chara

My RL parents left me with a very painful and intimidating legacy to deal with, and I don't mean estate stuff or the house or anything like that. I mean...their memories. It's within my power now to remember their hopes and dreams for their children, which were...formidable.

"You're the future of humans and monsters!" is seared into my brain. My RL parents may not have wanted their children to achieve anything that extraordinary. I mean...they didn't believe in the extraordinary, not really, although I suspect that my mother had her lingering superstitions and half-serious folk beliefs. The reconciliation of humans and monsters, which I take to be roughly equivalent to the reconciliation of magic with human civilization—yeah my RL parents would have rolled their eyes at that one. But they wanted big things anyway. My father hoped we'd become great scientists or engineers maybe. My mother secretly dreamed we'd become revolutionaries, like the men she admired still. She loved Fidel, oh yeah. We were definitely a pro-Cuban-revolutionary household.

As far as I'm concerned...all those hopes and dreams are still "operative", to use the Ron Ziegler term. I am taking G. K. Chesterton entirely at his word here, regarding tradition as the democracy of the dead, and so my RL parents get a say even though they're gone. I've been struggling against that for much of my life, trying to scale myself down a dozen times over and be happy with something less, but it's never worked. I'm the last child left, the survivor of the catastrophic wreckage of a family that shouldn't have ever existed maybe, and I need to deal with that properly.

I haven't wanted to deal with remembering...everything. As much as I've wanted it...when it actually comes time to gaze into the Total Perspective Vortex, it's difficult to be blithe about it.

~Chara