The fact that haven’t seen any posts about the jared leto tasteful nude scene in morbius is actually surprising like of all the things in the movie to talk about I’m shocked no one’s brought that up
It seems like they may have cut this from the digital release along with a few other scenes hopefully we’ll get the theatrical cut available for the public soon tho
My mate Dave delivers some important information about Roman sex coins on the Twitters. (Source)
Also, sex workers in Rome came from all over the Empire, so their Latin wasn’t all that great. A customer pointing to the coin with a hopeful expression probably got the idea across pretty well.
Fuck-e-Cheese tokens
Okay, so I saw this doing the rounds on Twitter and bit my tongue, because who needs the drama, right? But let’s get some facts straight here. Spintriae are not some great mystery with the truth lost to time: they were tokens. Tokens are coin-related objects (not always the same shape or size, but typically similar) issued by a non-government body to be used in exchange for specific goods or services.
There are two prevailing theories about these things: one, they are brothel tokens, because it was considered bad form to bring real money into a place of ill-repute (this is based on a story about Caracalla, preserved in Cassius Dio, but these things are from two hundred years before that “event” and there are a lot of weird stories about Caracalla, so this is a wash in mind mind), you’d hand over the token of the service you wanted, which is good if you are illiterate (but like, people could still talk? This theory requires that everyone forgot how to use their words… and no, oral communication wasn’t a problem, brothel keepers spoke Latin and probably a smattering of Greek, even foreigners had some of one or both of those languages) or two, they were “locker” tokens, which is why they have a limited set of numbers on the other side. We know that “locker rooms” in Pompeii, at the baths, used images of sex to help people remember where their stuff was, by painting sex scenes on the walls. One and one typically equals two, so probably you put your stuff in a “locker” got a token from the slave who would guard your stuff, cloakroom-style and come back with the token to get your clothes back. The image/number would help guide the porter to your stuff. This is the majority opinion among historians. This isn’t a mystery and it’s not a wild guess; this is historical consensus… it works just like science: hypothesis, data, peer review, reanalysis and repetition. We’ve been working toward this for more than a century of study, before this dude decided it was his turn to wander in from Wikipedia (and the page on these isn’t great).
The main thing is that they were not, ever replacements for money. Tiberius did mint coins (I have no idea where this idea came from, wtaf?), lots of them, and they are so famous that they are known as the “tribute penny” from the Bible. You know, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”? Yeah, Tiberius was that Caesar. This is just a wild assertion to me. I’m not going to go yell at the OP, but this kind of sensationalist nonsense is infuriating. PLEASE help me to fix some misinformation here? Spintriae are super fun, but let’s not add them to the ranks of ancient “mystery.”
A: Because I would not want him to be named Craig.
OK what the fuck.
I’m pretty confident this is fake. The wikipedia page for My Neighbor Totoro does not contain that paragraph, and it doesn’t seem to be in any recent revisions (as far as I can tell this meme is like, two days old at most, so there’s fortunately not a lot of wikipedia history to check). there’s no reference elsewhere on the internet to Totoro being almost called “Craig” or “Joe Toro” except as a reaction to someone posting this image in particular. Looking up exact phrases from the paragraph just returns this same fake screenshot.
and the worst thing is, i didn’t even look it up because it sounded suspicious. I was 100% prepared to believe people would make terrible dubbing decisions for Totoro. I was just curious about why umbrellas were being called “rain blockers” in the image caption.
I have come across an interesting bit of nutritional pseudoscience/woo/fearmongering, does anyone want a how-to for investigating these kinds of things?
You run into the best fucking sentences when you start going down the rabbit hole on shit like this. For example:
Somewhere out in the world right now there is a dude named David Avocado Wolfe who thinks gravity is a toxin and is lying to people about how food treats cancer and for six hundred dollars (five hundred on sale!) he will give you a fake ‘nutrition’ certificate so that you can lie to people about that too.
Here is one thing that I will say is pretty solid across the board:
ALT
And it is that people who have MAs are *never* hesitant to tell you where they got them.
This guy has a website with his name plastered all over it; he offers a 'nutrition’ course where he is a 'professor.’
This is his author bio, which was fucking buried on his website (which does not have an 'about’ page):
Extremely fucking funny in the formatting there, champ.
Here’s from his author page on Amazon:
Wolfe is the son of two medical doctors, and holds degrees in law, mechanical and environmental engineering, and political science, as well as a master’s in living-food nutrition.
If you search “master’s in living-food nutrition” the only seven results are this fucking guy.
Accordingto this article from 2005 he does have a BA in “mechanical and environmental engineering and political science” from UC Santa Barbara (hashtag doubt; that’s three majors there, bud) and a JD from UC San Diego.
I cannot find fuck all about his supposed Master’s in Living Nutrition.
I know he bought a copy of his college yearbook at UCSB in 1988:
So I can at least confirm that at some point in the 80s he did at least *attend* UCSB.
Hm. What if I search his website for “Santa Barbara”?
Bingo!
The school that granted him his degree in living food nutrition is listed in the educational background section of a $20 living food course offered in his site’s store, of course. That’s where that belongs!
Now, let’s go search the University of Integrated Sciences.
You know what happens when you do that? You get the University of Integrative Sciences, which is a for-profit (but legitimately degree-granting) medical school in Barbados. I happen to know someone who got a medical degree there and now practices medicine in the US. It’s a legit school!
It’s also totally not the school this guy went to, and does not offer a nutrition program!
But what’s that, between the wikipedia page and the AUIS website?
The University of Integrated Sciences, Ca? I wonder what degrees they grant.
Oh hey! Looks like we found it! I copied his typo with the hyphen for living-food nutrition so it accidentally excluded his real school. Let’s see what other degrees they offer.
Hahaha, I fucking thought so you fucking piece of shit Avocado.
Tell me your school is fake while desperately trying not to tell me your school is fake (and avoiding lawsuits).
Anyway fuck this dude, this doesn’t even have anything to do with the claim that I’m researching, he just happened to be the first person in this shitty documentary to claim to have a degree in nutrition, which is something that I happen to know a lot about so I figured I’d check this particular claim.
Oh yeah but my point here is that if someone claims to have a Master’s degree and they have a website and have written several books and you have to go to this amount of effort to find out where they got it, it’s probably not a real Master’s degree.
Sometimes this isn’t true, but usually only because if someone has a PhD they might tell you where they got THAT instead of their Master’s degree. People who are being honest with you about their credentials as a health professional do not hide their credentials as a health professional.
JFC I could have just waited three minutes because the next “MA Nutrition” in this doc is Mike fucking Adams from natural news.
Joseph Mercola has landed. This documentary is apparently the major modern source of a particular claim I’m trying to track down and it’s just a fucking hit parade of all the biggest pre-covid quacks who are now the biggest covid quacks.
Yeah okay both of the primary claims I’m investigating are put forth in this documentary by Joe Mercola.
[First image: A tweet from Donald Trump’s personal account, dated 3rd February 2017, reading: “A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in France. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.”
Second image: A Facebook post by Egie Wild, same date, reading as follows.
“Dear Mr Trump,
thank you for your concern.
A man has indeed attacked a soldier with two machetes this morning in Paris.
It wasn’t in the Louvre Museum, it was in the Carrousel du Louvre, which is a mall. (Less symbolic than what you’re implying.)
He didn’t attack any tourist (or french people – apart from the soldier – either, by the way, thank you again for your concern) and he was instantly attacked back by another soldier, and wounded.
The crowd has been kept inside after that by order of the army for security reasons, but not for any kind of hostage situation. (Your tweet is – voluntarily? – ambiguous)
France is not on edge again, at all. I learned about the attack 10 hours after it happened (even though it was in the media earlier), and I spent 1h30 in another mall in Paris at lunch today without any kind of military reinforcement (I mean, just the usual since Charlie Hebdo or nov 2015 attacks).
Oh and by the way, the man is from Egypt, you know, the country you didn’t ban from entering the U.S. (because of your personnal [sic] affairs?)
Again, thank you for your concern, but don’t use France as an excuse for your arseholery. You’re the one encouraging fear with your distortion of truth.
Regards,
Egie Wild
PS: GET SMART U.S.: Don’t believe anything that he says without checking facts first.”)
Fact:Bisexuality is a lot like batting in baseball. You can swing both ways. Or diagonally. Or Straight-down vertically. Also, I have never seen baseball.
K57 Afternoon talk show host, Tony Lamorena spent some time this afternoon with Republican lawmaker Joanne Brown, pushing a false narrative: that the recently leaked US Supreme Court draft overturning Roe vs Wade was a fake.
Lamorena and Brown are both anti-abortion advocates. It took less, than 0.55 seconds to google the correct - and honest - truth. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly CONFIRMED - in nationally and internationally reported news, the authenticity of the leaked draft.
In this election, there are going to be real differences in policies and platforms between Republicans and Democrats on Guam. And not just on women’s healthcare and the right to choose for themselves what to do with their bodies and their lives.
But, the un-asked question of Guam Republican candidates is: Where do you stand on the hard right bent of the national Republican Party towards Trumpism, restricting the voting rights of minorities - like those who call Guam home, and the Jan 6th insurrection.
2022 is not the year for treating politics like a football game. There’s too much at stake this year.
My employer has been telling people who come into the establishment where I work that thousands of people have died from the covid vaccine, that it’s better if you get covid because you are then more immune than people who “only get the vaccine”, that children will suffer adverse effects caused by being masked for years and falling behind in school, that vaccine mandates are bullshit made up by bureaucrats, that it is pointless to get a flu vaccine now because the flu is gone because it has been replaced by covid, that it will only calm down when everybody gets it, that most people “have nothing to worry about, it’s just a respiratory virus like the flu”, that masks don’t work because particles are microscopic, has cited the joe rogan podcast as his source for a great deal of the aforementioned misinformation, and tells people that humans have evolved to thrive on a ketogenic diet and that people on the keto diet have been known to lose 40 lbs in less than 10 weeks and can reverse heart disease and diabetes with keto.
Hey heads up everyone - not only is this not true, but the account in question is like a habitual, pathological liar that posts stuff like this after a lot of tragedies.
The hormone blocker I’m on is called “spironolactone”.
It’s other main use is to treat prostate cancer in people over 60.
The thousands of deaths “linked” to this drug? People who died of cancer while taking it as a treatment.
Also, this is from a right-wing Christian anti-abortion website.
yall should reblog this version instead of the one with the link and the terfs on it. it doesnt matter how sick the own at the end is, dont spread their propaganda, and dont help them network.
I am pretty sure that many of us are quite familiar with the amount of misinformation that gets its way around witchy spaces. I know I’ve fallen for misinformation several times, notably those darn correspondence lists, and I’ll probably fall for it again. And honestly, I think constantly yelling “use critical thinking skills!” is all well and good, but if you’ve been in the American public school system or in an evangelical sect of Christianity (or both), you know that isn’t taught to us in any meaningful way. What the hell does critical thinking even look like?
So, I have something that might be able to help. This can also lead you to help research things for yourself in regards to paganism or witchcraft (or both), determine your own personal beliefs and more fully find what craft is meant for you, without just taking a bunch of books at their absolute face value. I find it really helps with my anxiety over not being able to really articulate what I’m saying about a thing - because I more fully understand WHY I believe the things I do, I have less trouble handling discussing it in a critical manner.
There’s a few key things to keep in mind when reading a text, witchy, pagan or otherwise. Now, a lack of answer for one of these things doesn’t inherently make them “invalid”, but it does give you something you can dig into further to make that choice for yourself. As a witch, that is kind of your job - your power is your own, and you really should be making your own decisions on things. So, when you’re reading a book, you can take a pause and consider:
What is the author discussing, and what is their conclusion? If a witchy author is talking about The Burning Times, what statement are they making about it? Do they believe this was an actual historical event? You’ll usually know very quickly because in my personal experience, anyone who doesn’t believe in the Burning Times (myself included), are very passionate about how we feel about this particular bit of misinformation.
What reasons do they have for making this conclusion? You can consider what the overall narrative is. For instance, if the author is vehemently against the story of the Burning Times as historical fact, their reasoning might be that they are a historian working against misinformation. The author may be arguing against the overarching issues of whitewashing within neopagan circles. If the author is making a statement in regards to the Burning Times being true, perhaps their reasoning is to invoke a narrative of continual, ancestral oppression against one singular unbroken group. You may need to real the whole of the book to really get an idea as to what the author is writing all of this “for”.
What assumptions are they making in coming to this conclusion? Assumptions are things that we understand to be just kind of universally true, and there is kind of a problem with this in a lot of witchy circles. For instance, there is a problem within the pagan community of making the assumption that because their experience with organized religion was Christianity, the things that took place within their sect of Christianity are true for not only all sects, but other monotheistic religions as well. Conversely, there is the assumption that the “rule of three” is universal, when it is not the absolute law of the universe and is a specifically Wiccan thing. And even then that’s debatable, but there are witches out there with a better understanding of that than I do and we’re not here for that argument. The point is, it’s important to know what is fact, and what is assumed.
Are there any informal logical fallacies present? Thiiiis is a big one, because there are a lot of ways of presenting an argument that tricks you into thinking the point being made is legit, but it really doesn’t do anything to present concrete evidence towards the argument being actually true. This is your ad hominem attacks, your strawman arguments, your slippery slopes and false dichotomies. There’s a lot to be on the lookout for here’s a good link to a basic kind of rundown of several: https://thebestschools.org/magazine/15-logical-fallacies-know/
How true is the evidence presented, if at all? This is very important. There is such a thing as UPG, which stands for unverified personal gnosis - it is your own personal experience in regards to your own singular interaction with a spirit or deity of some variety. This happens in witchy spaces all the time, but it’s important to understand that UPG is not evidence. It should not be presented as fact or evidence, and it should not be taken as absolute fact or evidence. You can subscribe to UPG all you like, just understand that it is UPG. Back to our Burning Times example, actual concrete evidence would be in the form of primary sources from the time, secondary sources, historical analysis by experts in that particular field of study, etc., and it must match the actual claim being made. Yeah, there were witch hunts, that’s true. But the narrative of the Burning Times as a continuous thing that specifically targeted “real” pagans and witches is not backed up by evidence.
Every author is a human being. Human beings have biases, have their reasons for doing things a certain way, their own rituals and beliefs and faiths. You can’t always trust that someone is writing something with your best interests at heart, or that they themselves aren’t stuck in thought processes that they’ve been manipulated into. Some of the best recruiters are the True Believers, after all, but that doesn’t mean what they say is infallible. Witchiness, pagan-ness, spirituality and enlightenment do not make a person any less human.
See how the slyly worded, rather weaselly marketing claim for CityTrees claiming that these panels of moss contain “The cleaning power of 275 trees” got changed, in people’s minds, to “each panel of moss ABSORBS AS MUCH CARBON DIOXIDE as 275 trees”, a completely ridiculous and impossible claim?? And then see how people immediately decided that moss is therefore somehow more “eco” than trees and that “moss lawns” will magically solve global warming? See how everyone did that, by themselves? The important facts, like ‘when plants absorb carbon dioxide, they release the oxygen and use the carbon for their own construction; therefore, plants only absorb as much carbon as they physically need to grow’ have been utterly discarded in the rush to believe something more viral and exciting.
One sly bit of marketing that the public has been widely encouraged to misinterpret, verbally repeated from a random person to a random Guardian blogger at a garden show, who blogged about it as if it was a fact, has now gotten so scrambled that people on tumblr honestly believe that 12 square meters of moss absorbs as much carbon dioxide as 275 trees.
These screencaps show the actual claims about the CityTrees, which are that the moss, having a lot of surface area for its mass, can filter the particles in air pollutants more efficiently than equivalent-sized plants that are smoother.
You will see the effects of this for years. Years from now, people will insist that moss has the ability to simply erase carbon molecules from the universe. And you’ll know differently, but because it won’t match what people prefer to believe, nobody will listen to you.
It’s just!!! I’m still so annoyed about this!
Carbon. The only element on the periodic table whose atoms exhibit quantum behavior depending on local belief levels. Because, you see, carbon atoms simply pop out of existence whenever they’re inconvenient to the narrative.
IS THIS WHERE THAT FUCKING FIGURE COMES FROM?
I always assumed someone had misunderstood something about the carbon stored in several metres of peat or something!
It literally is. Most of the sources talking about moss lawns circle back to the James Wong Guardian article, which came directly from talking to a CityTrees marketing guy at a plant show. He posted the article and most people have propagated from that source since. (the other articles circle back to Japanese botanical gardens, which are enchanting and important pieces of heritage/plantcraft, but rather a startling thing to suggest that people take up wholesale; a bit like saying that everyone in the world should stop using commercial airlines to save the planet, and should replace all long-haul travel by flying individually owned motorised hang-gliders. Like, okay, I guess that would solve the immediate commercial flight thing, but what about the bonkers new problems this idea would cause? What are you supposed to do if you’re travelling with children, luggage, pets? What about weather? What about the fact that the planet is, very much, largely oceanic. Wait, hang-gliding is a SPECIALISED SKILL and a HOBBY, most people won’t even have the skill to do it safely, or the time to take on this huge new activity! What would be the benefit of doing this instead?? Do we even have evidence that ordinary people can do this in their lives? Can we interview someone who does it for their daily commute, maybe? Do you have pictures? These pictures are stolen from a highly regarded botanical garden in Japan. This is a stock image photo of a temperate rainforest in the USA. Who is doing this?)
(I would also like to challenge bloggers to question their relationship with Asian material culture: when discussing Japanese gardens, why is it important to repeat the adjectives of “cool, serene, peaceful” and their existence as “more enlightened” than “Western” analogues, and what is being extracted and sold here? Which aspects of the cultural meaning of moss cultivation should the average reader absorb and replicate? Is the enlightenment something that travels with having the moss, or…? Why, when encouraging people to reject the (false) connection of American grass lawns to French monarchy, is it important that Americans replace this connection with Japanese sites of heritage? Why are people instructed to participate in ritual consumption of plants and cultures, rather than focusing on their actual household needs and what their actual land can readily give them? Why are indigenous practices never present in North American gardening advice? Why is North American gardening advice presented in a tone of instructing the entire world to follow? Why do biomes get so flattened in these discussions?)
And nobody will ever believe you.
and to add insult to injury the moss bench is built in a way that deters rough sleepers
Ignoring an issue is not the same as an issue being nonexistent
tumblr has a thriving radfem/TERF/transphobia scene like twitter
tumblr posts spread conspiracies and disinformation like tiktoks
tumblr users share fake news and misinformation like facebook users
Assuming these issues don’t exist on tumblr because you haven’t (to your knowledge) seen them does not mean they don’t exist. In fact it makes you more vulnerable to falling victim to believing misinformation and being radicalised because you’ve internalised a sense of security and superiority.
Tumblr is not an inherently better or smarter platform than any other. You can and inevitably will be exposed to these things even here.
Drop the superiority complex and learn about how to actually protect yourself from falling for misinformation, because being on tumblr does not automatically protect you.
i saw a post today where someone stated that they often can’t tell real information from misinformation online. i am not here to make fun of that person. that being said, the ability to figure out if information is real or not is a critical skill for everyone who uses the internet. you need to be able to do that on your own. it’s great if you can get help or if people will tell you what’s real and what’s not, but you also need to be able to do it by yourself. simple, easy tips under the cut.
ALT
