"I had learned too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled “Heil Schuschnigg” today would thunder “Heil Hitler” tomorrow."
- Stefan Zweig

The ten points of the Nuremberg Code
1) The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

2) The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature. 2/n

3) The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment. 3/n

4) The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury. 4/n

5) No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects. 5/n

The Creative Process in 43 Hayao Miyazaki Screengrabs

(Context: https://t.co/nqjmAtLAND)

@jeffreyatucker In the end, it is all a natural consequence of a very human foible, namely that we all do everything we can to blame anybody or anything else for our problems, if we can get away with it. It's the reason why rulers start wars to squelch domestic dissent - macro and micro the same

The very notion of the germ theory of disease revolves around this and while it is good for selling medical interventions, treatments and pharmaceuticals, it is no good for either personal health, or public health in any way. We need to start looking at health on a holistic level

More of a systems approach to health would get us to see that the whole instinct to stamp out viruses, like the very counter-factual notion of "zero Covid," and other nonsense, are driven by this need to blame somebody or something else for our problems, so we can have our cake

and eat it too, i.e. we can pass the blame to others and go and kill them, be they bugs or other people (lockdowns???). The results are disastrous for health on both a personal and a public level, and we continue on a path of assured self-destruction. But times are changing, now.

Lifestyle Medicine @aclifemed provides the new paradigm, more of a systems approach to health, in which personal responsibility for our habits comes first, starting with nutrition. Immune systems become depressed by fatigue, stress, inner conflict, malnutrition and so on. Change

1) Dreaded thread on why I think the response to postcritique is so vitriolic. Short version: Because literary studies is a discipline in search of an application.

2) Before I go on, I'll say from the outset that many in lit studies explicitly reject the idea that the field *should* have an application. My opinion is that's fine if you want to do book clubs, but if you want an institution you can't ignore that difficult issue. But anyway...

3) The evidence by this point is overwhelming that when lit scholars talk about 'method' we're actually just talking about ourselves: 'ways of reading,' 'how we argue,' 'phenomenology of reading,' etc. etc.

4) David Kurnick nicely illustrates this phenomenon:

5) But none of this is method discussion. Talking about ourselves, how we approach our objects of study, our motives and objectives, our commitments, etc. would be the *beginning* of a method convo in every other discipline. In lit studies it's the *end*, or the whole convo!