“You’re so Pretty!” by the Matadors of Shame
The ward where I lived constituted 10% of the land area of the entire city, but it was not possible to buy a tomato except at the one-day-a-week farmer’s market in the summer.
Last spring, I bought my first car. Because I had walked and bused everywhere but I didn’t formally exercise, I assumed I would gain weight rapidly upon switching to car transportation. Not so—I lost about 15 pounds really quickly. Before long, I had to buy new pants. I still wasn’t exercising, but being able to reach beyond the North City food desert for food access caused me to lose weight without trying. Scary.
I live in Detroit now. Food access is varied here. There are no major chain big box groceries inside the city, but we have a number of medium box stores ranging from horrible to good, as well as a number of smaller ethnic and specialty stores. We also have one of the largest, oldest farmer’s markets in the country, where at 2am I watched friends buy bushels of beautiful raspberry-red heirloom tomatoes for canning. It really runs the gamut. I say Detroit is not a food desert, but in the likely event that my very broken car quits in the next month or two…. Ask me what I think about Detroit food access then. And then help me look for my old, bigger pants.
— rustbelt commenting on The Hierarchy Of Food Needs
it bothers me how few people are listening to the matadors of shame. i mean, i might listen to them too much, but people are spend a lot of time listening to lessor pop punk bands.
plz download and listen:
Colonialism, Soap, and the Cleansing Metaphor
The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pears’ Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place — it is the ideal toilet soap.
Bruce Alexander is best known - though deserves to be much better known - for the ‘Rat Park’ experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the ‘addictiveness’ of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain doses. But Alexander’s observations of addicts at the clinic where he worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were trying to cope.
To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious, were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats’ responses to drugs such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence. Even a sugar solution could not tempt them to the morphine water (though they would choose this if naloxone was added to block the opiate effects). It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement, shaved, catheterised and with probes inserted into their median forebrain bundles.
I have really grown to love what the NIH/National Library of Medicine are doing here at MedlinePlus: Drugs, Herbs and Supplement sections.
When I am not using it to check trade names/generic names I really like to search various drugs that come up in our study and check out the side effects. e.g: “foamy urine” (this would be totally terrifying even before i contemplated what it was communicating to me about my kidneys). Or, you know, check to see whether or not my symptoms that come with taking over the recommending dosage of various OTC allergy/cold meds are worth paying any attention to.
Vanity Ballroom. Detroit, MI.
seriously, detroit and cleveland are so pretty. they are full of all these buildings that people spent a ton of money and care building.
One of our senior colleagues recently reflected, somewhat ruefully, that anthropology has lost control over its two most basic terms, culture and ethnography; that, in the age of deconstruction and critical postmodernism, we have entered a conceptual free-for-all in which our disciplinary quest has no terrain of its own anymore. Our tropes have been taken over, our signs seized.
— John and Jean Comaroff, Preface, Ethnoraphy and the Historic Imagination. [via]
We believe that the radical possibilities of total liberation from authority are far more transformative and intoxicating than any steps to a revolution as prescribed by any so-called revolutionary chairman. Take their stance on Arizona as an example, one of their demands “No more troops! Demilitarize the border!”, this is not only a conservative stance amongst revolutionaries, but it shows that once again the people are ahead of their revolutionary “leaders.” The RCP, like many on the left, are afraid to state the obvious, that millions of people have already disregarded the legitimacy of the border line, they have to move across it every day, regardless of the law. Further more, by solely opposing the militarization of the borderlands they join in a colonial tradition that attacks the indigenous people of these occupied lands, as tribes are indeed separated by the border wall. By holding the legitimacy of the state over those of the individuals and communities struggling to preserve their ways of life, the RCP become de facto ideological enforcers of the border.
Defining janitors with 401K’s as “capitalists” is a kind of social promotion comparable to the elevation by progressives like Teixeira and Abramowitz of shoe-store clerks who dropped out of college into the “mass upper middle class.” Genuine capitalists derive most of their income from the return on their investments or savings, not from labor. By this definition, there are hardly any capitalists in the U.S. Most of the rich are the “working rich,” who derive most of their income from wages or professional fees, not from investments. We are a nation of wage earners, some paid well and others poorly.
Quick — what is the “paradigm” of medicine, to which my correspondents claim to be alternative? Give up? Good for you, because there isn’t one. People are complicated and there are all sorts of entirely different things that can go wrong. Physicians don’t fall back on a paradigm to fix everything, they do whatever is likely to work. Antibiotics, surgical excision of tumors, hormonal therapy, receptor blockers, physical therapy, nutrition, prostheses, cancer chemotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, social support, surgical repair of joint trauma, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccinations, and so on and so forth, are all specific ways of addressing various, often entirely unrelated problems.
The only “paradigm” physicians worry about is whether something works or not. The way you find that out is to subject it to rigorous testing. It’s often helpful to understand as much as possible about the underlying biological processes that are making a person sick. It can help guide an efficient search for new therapies, and help select the right one for a particular case. But it isn’t always necessary — some remedies are just “empirical,” as they say, i.e. they are known to work but people aren’t sure why. Doctors aren’t above using these, even if they’d generally prefer to know what’s going on.
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tip: paradigms (like privilege!) may be hard to see when you are immersed in them.
I find it truly bizarre when I talk to people (okay if we’re being real the only people that really rile me up when they do this are MDs/med students) who are convinced that there is not cultural/moral/social influence on biomedicine, but rather all truth/behavior/procedure/therapies are derived from pure empirical research. Why aren’t y’all reading Kuhn?
In this post I will outline some societal forces that have led to AA’s popularity. I will also argue that the social sciences are integral for crafting new and effective addiction treatments. The ideas and data presented here come in large part from my comparative research on alcohol use and abuse among homeless men, college students, and veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.
I liked this, as well as the Wired article to which it refers. I have never been to/participated in a 12 step meeting but have a tendency to have a positive opinion of them (mostly, I think, due to my particular history and cultural context that has led me to probably overvalue the idea of sponsorship/accountability as used in this model) and a tendency towards the AA model of addiction (even though I really don’t think that there is just one thing that is ‘addiction’ or that there is a unified addiction experience or relationship with psychoactive substances). Idk, things to think about.
Obv I generally agree with anyone that is like YOU KNOW WHO COULD REALLY PROVIDE SOME INSIGHT INTO *insert anything here*? ANTHROPOLOGISTS!
Ajurn Appadurai [sic], a prominent contemporary social-cultural anthropologist and Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, addresses debates about the extent to which the world has always been a place of faraway places and distant times. He will argue the need to develop a new approach to tackle this question, one which moves away from single factors, forces and causes, and focuses instead on sets of interactive phenomena which combine to produce the sense that large-scale connectivity saturates the practices of everyday life.
I AM REALLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS even if they couldn’t be bothered to proofread/spell his name right.