Look at some historical examples of mass psychogenic illnesses: dancing plagues, laughing plagues, meowing nuns,
Basically: mass psychogenic illness, and presentation of various mental illnesses, do not occur in a vacuum. Cultures shape them.
There have been several mass outbreaks of men completely convinced their penises are shrinking, anchoring them with string at night so they don't get sucked back inside.
Almost all in Southeast Asia.
https://t.co/fr9X1E1ayx
In which people compulsively dance until exhaustion, dehydration, and death.
It is not real. Arctic explorers invented it to justify sexually assaulting women.
Like drapetomania, it was colonizers pathologizing self preservation
https://t.co/cmq6zg9ZJ1
You should expect there to be different presentations of various mental illnesses in different places.
150 years ago, if you had night terrors, you hallucinated monsters and fair folk trying to eat you.
After the Wright brothers, you probably hallucinated aliens abducting you.
The US has had modern zombies permeate public consciousness for 52 years. Everyone knows what zombies are. They are as ingrained into culture as any folkloric demon or monster anywhere else.
No rage virus or space radiation or 2-4-5 trioxin needed. Just stress, applied at the right points.
Stress, in the right conditions, does interesting things.
Schools and convents have historically been perfect breeding grounds for this.
Get them to have zombies on their mind. Have em do zombie-related art, or marathons of zombie movies, or do papers on the ethnology of zombies.
Let that percolate.
Somehow frustrate the everloving fuck out of them. Constrain their freedom, clamp down with your adult authority, annoy them even more than teenagers usually are annoyed.
Have one kid pretend to bite another. Use squibs for realism, call in a favor from Tom Savini or something.
People have, multiple times, danced so violently for so long that they wore away the skin on their feet revealing bone before dying of dehydration.
And in American culture, the zombie is standing right there as a perfect outlet.
You could call it Quisling Syndrome, after the similar condition in the book World War Z.
Well, look again at the 2016 evil clowns, and how one of the forgotten plotlines in 2020 was that they'd returned.
Speaking of which: notice how readily and hungrily people ate that up? How excited they were to see it?
If you do it, buy me some rice to thank me: https://t.co/TRTsg6UUwh
More from Anosognosiogenesis
The US immigration act of 1907 signed by Teddy Roosevelt: ableist as hell. https://t.co/ficeXOImo5
One theory for why the Spanish flu was so unusually lethal for young people:
They hadn't lived through the previous flu pandemic of 1889-1890 (https://t.co/OiDZYtdbWx) that killed about 1 million people. And thus had no carryover immunity.
It's suspected that the 1889 pandemic was not influenza, but a coronavirus.
The 1889 virus spread rapidly, killing mostly the elderly.
The 1889 virus was the first truly modern pandemic: people knew about germs, it spread via trains, it spread at the speed of modern transportation and commerce
Today's covid denialists are tomorrow's openly eugenicist "these disabled people are a drain on society"
— Anosognosiogenesis (@pookleblinky) November 29, 2020
Literally. 13 years after the Spanish flu, the very first people the nazis targeted were disabled people.
What caused a lot of those disabilities, you think?
One theory for why the Spanish flu was so unusually lethal for young people:
They hadn't lived through the previous flu pandemic of 1889-1890 (https://t.co/OiDZYtdbWx) that killed about 1 million people. And thus had no carryover immunity.
It's suspected that the 1889 pandemic was not influenza, but a coronavirus.
The 1889 virus spread rapidly, killing mostly the elderly.
The 1889 virus was the first truly modern pandemic: people knew about germs, it spread via trains, it spread at the speed of modern transportation and commerce
More from History
Thank you so much to the incredible @gregjenner and his team for having me on "You're Dead to Me" and to @kaekurd for being so hilarious and bringing Gilgamesh the restaurant into my life!
Here’s a thread of some of the stuff referenced in the podcast for those interested
First of all, what even is cuneiform?
It’s a writing system from the ancient Middle East, used to write several languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform signs can stand for whole words or syllables. Here’s a little primer of its evolution https://t.co/7CVjLCHwkS
What kinds of texts was cuneiform used to write?
Initially, accounting records and lists.
Eventually, literature, astronomy, medicine, maps, architectural plans, omens, letters, contracts, law collections, and more.
Texts from the Library of Ashurbanipal, who ruled the ancient Assyrian empire when it was at its largest in the 7th century BCE, represent many of the genres of cuneiform texts and scholarship.
Here’s a short intro to the library via @opencuneiform https://t.co/wjnaxpMRrC
The Library of Ashurbanipal has a complicated modern and ancient history, which you can read about in this brilliant (and open access) book by Prof @Eleanor_Robson
Here’s a thread of some of the stuff referenced in the podcast for those interested
First of all, what even is cuneiform?
It’s a writing system from the ancient Middle East, used to write several languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform signs can stand for whole words or syllables. Here’s a little primer of its evolution https://t.co/7CVjLCHwkS
What kinds of texts was cuneiform used to write?
Initially, accounting records and lists.
Eventually, literature, astronomy, medicine, maps, architectural plans, omens, letters, contracts, law collections, and more.
Texts from the Library of Ashurbanipal, who ruled the ancient Assyrian empire when it was at its largest in the 7th century BCE, represent many of the genres of cuneiform texts and scholarship.
Here’s a short intro to the library via @opencuneiform https://t.co/wjnaxpMRrC
The Library of Ashurbanipal has a complicated modern and ancient history, which you can read about in this brilliant (and open access) book by Prof @Eleanor_Robson
You May Also Like
https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.
https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d
Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.
...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.
Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.
https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d
Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.
...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.
Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x
The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x
Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x
The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x
It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
As someone\u2019s who\u2019s read the book, this review strikes me as tremendously unfair. It mostly faults Adler for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had! https://t.co/pqpt5Ziivj
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) January 12, 2021
The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x
Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x
The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x
It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
