Apparently I badly want to go on my “stop making fun of plague doctors, they were ahead of their time and doing the best they could with the primitive equipment they had available” rant.
They weren’t stupid.
They shoved herbs in their breathing hose because they knew the air was bad and hoped it would help, and *they were right* in theory. The plague itself was not an airborn virus, but they couldn’t know that and it wasn’t the only thing killing people at the time anyway, and they covered *all* their bases. If they’d had the technological knowhow to make air tanks, or even better air filters, they would’ve. They just made the best air filters they could.
What we think they wore isn’t exactly what they wore, and what they actually wore would later be repurposed into scuba suits (and thus spacesuits too) and *actual hazmat suits*, because the theory was sound, the materials were just lacking, and honestly what they did with the materials they had was hardcore.
they wore full face protection which avoids the most obvious mucosal transmission routes
INCLUDING GLASS IN THE EYEHOLES. They invented safety goggles before most of the world had nailed down corrective eye glasses yet
they wore additional head protection to cover seams in their mask/hoods
they oiled and waxed all their clothes to make it fluid-resistant
they wore separate but tight fitting equally if not more fluid-resistant gloves and/or armcuffs so they could keep hand contamination to a minimum even when dressing/undressing AND they only wore the suit in areas they thought was contaminated and took it off before entering uncontaminated areas
they may have used herbed vinegar to clean, and if the stories are true this was clever because 1) it’s available and portable 2) pretty effective as far as medieval disinfectants go versus the damage it does the the user (as opposed to what they had for bleach at the time, and the actual percentage level in alcohols at the time which was mostly insufficient for task as well as being needed for more important things); vinegar is *still* a decent disinfectant even now
It honestly took doctors well into the twentieth century to get that level of obsessive attention to hygiene and cross-contamination back. A whole lot of babies and mothers wouldn’t’ve died, for instance, if a plague doctor instead of an obstetrician supported the birth because A PLAGUE DOCTOR WOULD KNOW TO WASH THEIR GODDAMNED HANDS.
Actual plague doctor’s outfits:
Who was responsible for turning plague doctors into laughingstocks instead of primative but honoured medical and scientific predecessors anyway?
Was it the Victorians? It was probably the Victorians. Those pretentious sanctimonious jerks ruined everything.
what she means: why is Dorian Gray never played by people with blond hair? why is Dorian always depicted as all pale and dark? oscar literally describes his hair as gold like two seconds after we meet him. directors apparently feel like they have to make Dorian look dark dangerous and brooding, but he’s not supposed to look dark and dangerous and brooding. That’s the whole point. No one ever suspects him because he looks like an innocent little cherub with golden curls and rosy cheeks. His physical appearance is described with terms that Western literary tradition, during the nineteenth century in particular, associated with goodness and godliness, and this is intentionally juxtaposed with the blackness of his soul. If you intentionally play him as someone who looks like a Byronic hero, much of the symbolism of his character is lost, right?
mutuals if my tumblr ever gets deleted you can find me in my house from 6am to 7am and then moving south towards the ranch by 7:30. I will then be standing on the dock of the lake until 3pm. From 4pm to 6pm you can find me in the secret woods by the southwest pond. I then will be traveling east and then down to the beach where I will be from 8pm to 10pm, after which I will walk back to my house through town and past the bus station
Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew
Some male friends of mine were once talking about how useful they’d be in an apocalypse, and I pointed out that as a weaver and sewer and maker of stuff, I’d be pretty damn useful and they tried to tell me they could just loot clothes from WalMart and they’d be fine. As if WalMart has endless supplies without weekly deliveries.
So just last night a friend of mine was talking about who he’d round up in the event of a zombie apocalypse and how I’m his go-to farmer on account of I know how to keep an entire homestead up and running and we’re talking about what kind of resources I’d need to keep a colony of about 50-ish people alive and i bring up what all goes into processing wool for clothing and such and he just kind of stops me like ‘wait, wait, we don’t need to do all of that because we can scavenge for clothes we don’t need to be able to make them’ and i’m just like, ‘dude, that works in the short-term maybe but if this community is going to be sustainable you’ve gotta have people whose job it is to make clothes and blankets and shit’
also cloth rots pretty quickly when left exposed to the elements and after the first few years or so anything we manage to scavenge isn’t going to be wearable anymore and anywho we’ve got to teach the kids everything or they’re not gonna know what to do some decades down the line when everything’s too rusted or rotted out to be of any practical use anymore, etc etc, and he’s reckoning that things like woodworking and smithing and ranching are more important than say, cleaning or cooking or dairying and meanwhile i’m just smh may all the gods have mercy on this poor fool
He also balked when i brought up how to run a laundry and what all was needed to make everyday shit like soap and toothpaste - like dude, you think this is going to be all about hunting and scavenging and being neato manly-man drifters like in the walking dead let me teach you a thing about keeping a village alive and healthy for more than a week man most of it is shit you keep thinking is non-essential on account of it being “women’s work” or “simple chores” that’re actually pretty labor-intensive and take time, training, knowledge, and practice to do successfully, let alone well, and are 100% absolutely necessary work in order for you to have any reasonably good quality of life after the world ends
Are we living in a post-scandal age? On the one hand—especially in the political realm—events that would have been scandal-worthy just a decade ago now seem to unfold without consequences. On the other, as the cases of Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves show, it’s still possible for shocking allegations to derail a career. The truth is that scandals are contextual. A scandal requires an attentive audience—and societies attend to some transgressions while ignoring others.
This week, we’re bringing you eight pieces about scandals from The New Yorker’s archive. Each reflects the values of its time.
“Do you realize that reports from ‘reliable sources’ about King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson are only just beginning! This thing is going on for years.”
“Only two people ever knew how it came about that Gabrielle Russier, discreet and prudent in her private life, given more easily to comradeship with men than romance, should have finally chosen a lover from among her students.”
“The mysterious and awful thing about the television quiz scandals is not that the jaded souls who ran the show were hoaxers but that dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of contestants, almost all of whom must have applied in the simplicity of good faith, were successfully enrolled in the hoax.” Read more.
“The American press didn’t catch on until later. When it did, the reporting of the Bergman-Rossellini news became a mass assault upon the principals in the case—mother, father, and child.” Read more.
“It is painful to most people that the man who perhaps had hoped to be remembered as the Prime Minister who led Britain historically into the European community should be apparently about to make his literal exit from office on a note of scandal rather than history.” Read more.
“The deacons of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church were dismayed, as well they might have been. Plymouth Church was the most fashionable church in Brooklyn, and its parishioners included many of that community’s most distinguished and influential citizens.” Read more.
“Last week, Monica Lewinsky published an essay in Vanity Fair about her life as an object of extreme mass voyeurism. She is recognized, she writes, ‘every day,’ and has found that ‘traditional employment’ is not an option; she gets by with ‘projects,’ and money from family and friends.” Read more.
The Texan Revolution formed from the anger of these white settlers in Texas, which was still part of Mexico at this time. They had moved from slave-owning southern part of the US and they became upset because the president of Mexico, Vicente Guerrero, abolished slavery. Mexico actually attempted to restrict American immigration into Mexico-owned Texas! The leaders of the Mexican centralist forces that defeated the Texan revolutionary forces at the Alamo were against slavery. If you ever hear a Texan say “Remember the Alamo!” just remember that the Texan settlers that died there had a vested interest in maintaining control of Texas territory so they could continue to use slave labor.
forget the alamo.
Fuck the alamo
Not only does the alamo suck as a historical monument, but fuck the people who fought there
Remember The Alamo, NOT as a brave battle, but as an important step in maintaining slavery. That may also help understand why the 14th Amendment, did NOT end slavery, it only transferred ownership from private hands to Government ownership.
For the first half of my life I lived in San Antonio. We were taught (from Kindergarten) that the people who fought in the Alamo were the heroes. Mexico the bad guy. It was a WOAH moment when I learned that wasn’t the case.
Also it’s super boring going to the Alamo every school year for field trips.
^^^
I took a year long class in middle school called Texas History and we were taught this shit was for freedom. That is was inspiring. I know Texas likes to rewrite textbooks like slaves being migrant workers but i feel betrayed by my teacher, my school, and my educational system. I’m not surprised, it is one of many wrongfully rewritten narratives but it took a decade for me to right this wrong. I was today years old when I found this out.
remember that short story they made you read in school called The Lottery where the whole town gets together and just stones a motherfucker at random what the fuck was up with that
Other people have said it before, and more eloquently than me, that
most robot stories are not about the possibilities presented by
robots, at all, they are about the current exploitation of our fellow
humans. Robots are about class and labour, inherently, the very term
created by Capek refers to labour. There are interesting stories
to tell about what happens when humanity’s needs are met by things
that are genuinely not people, but most robot narratives are not
interested in that, they’re interested in the mechanisms that lead
the exploiter to see the exploited as not-people, and the exploited
to see themselves as not people either.
Lots of people have done excellent analysis of robot stories through
the lens of class, but it’s high time to analyze class stories
through the lens of… robots. I’m kidding, but not entirely. The
whole thing occurred to me when halfway through reading The
Remains of the Day I realized it was the same book as Ancillary
Justice. Without denying the creative brilliance of either
author, the story of an aging butler looking back over his life and recognizing he served an unworthy master perfectly parallels the
story of an old AI looking back over its life and recounting the realization that it’s no longer willing to serve its master. Key
elements like the enmeshment of the self with the master and the
master’s needs, the existence fully confined to the smooth running
of a ship/house, the complete suppression of individual selfhood, are
almost identical. It’s identical down to the detail that the
narrator’s emotions are opaque to them, and the reader has to guess
them from their actions or the reactions of others: both novels have
scenes where we only find out that the protagonist has been crying
because a bystander points it out.
Even clearer is the fact that Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper from the
Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film) Rebecca is absolutely analogous
to a rogue AI, something a little like the Imperial Radch’s
grief-mad ships, and a little like HAL. She’s supposed to obey
orders, keep things running smoothly and otherwise stay out of the
way – and when it turns out that she has her own emotions and own
priorities, that is inherently horrifying. The fact that she, a
servant, is capable of love is more unsettling than her capacity for
hate, because emotion means she’s malfunctioning, that she isn’t
the blank slate of servitude she should be. Rebecca is a brilliant
thriller, but its central conceit is the anxiety over what if the
help were sentient. What if the people who cleaned your house and
cooked your food and had access to all the rooms of your house at all
hours and knew every last one of your secrets had the capacity to
disobey.This is somewhat mitigated by a protagonist who used
to be a white-collar sort of help herself, and by an ending that
sends a symbol of British aristocracy all up in flames.
Nevertheless. Robots are class and class is robots.
So true. This is inherent in the very etymology of the word ‘robot’.
R.U.R. is a 1920 science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. "R.U.R.“ stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), and the English phrase “Rossum’s Universal Robots” was the subtitle of the Czech original. It premiered in January 1921 and introduced the word “robot” to the world.
“Robot” displaced older words such as “automaton” or “android,” Karel Čapek named his brother Josef as the inventor of the word. In Czech, "robota" means forced labor of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ lands and is derived from "rab,“ meaning “slave.”
Photos, from top:
A scene from the 1922 Broadway production of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.
