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Category Archives: serious stuff

Happiness is not so simple

“Positive Attitude” Bullshit: On the dangers of “radical self-love” Radical self-love gurus do not tend to promote or even really engage in discussions on privilege or the disadvantages people are born into; that shit would undermine the cause of “changing yourself, not the system.”

Gaming journalism

“Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?”

Austerity in the UK, featuring somewhere i’ve been

Is saving Newcastle a mission impossible? The bins were overflowing. A few passersby suggested that newly arrived Roma people from Slovakia were to blame; others said that was unfair, and pointed out that the city council had lately halved its bin collections, and reduced street cleaning.

Therefore, life is unfair

Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.

Ursula Le Guin tells it like it is.

Transcript

Bill Mantlo

Tragic Tale Bill Mantlo was a legendary writer for Marvel Comics in the 1970s and 1980s. But today, he inhabits a broken body abandoned by both the health insurance industry and the federal healthcare reform meant to help people like him. This is his story. Probably my most hated comics writer once i got to […]

Depressing economics articles

Work in the Age of Anxiety => The 40-Year Slump […]In 1974, wages fell by 2.1 percent and median household income shrunk by $1,500. To be sure, it was a year of mild recession, but the nation had experienced five previous downturns during its 25-year run of prosperity without seeing wages come down. What no […]

fat

What No One Tells You About Losing Lots of Weight After all that work, it can be a disappointing blow to discover that bodies that have lost 50-plus pounds simply don’t look like bodies that have maintained a steady weight since reaching adulthood. The Fat Trap While researchers have known for decades that the body […]

introversion

Revenge of the Introvert [Researchers] found that having “an orientation inconsistent with societal values” is a risk factor for poor mental health. The findings support what the researchers call the personality-culture clash hypothesis: “Psychological adjustment depends on the degree of match between personality and the values of surrounding society.” To the extent that introverts feel […]

Stupidity is hardwired

The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter? The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.