BC HISTORY
Saved by @Alex1Powell

Look at some historical examples of mass psychogenic illnesses: dancing plagues, laughing plagues, meowing nuns,

 Here's a video on them: https://t.co/YNxCk7ZpEe
They are interesting, but what is more interesting to me is Culture Bound Syndrome. https://t.co/hMKaApUMZn

Basically: mass psychogenic illness, and presentation of various mental illnesses, do not occur in a vacuum. Cultures shape them.
For instance, Koro.

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
Here's a description of one outbreak in Hainan in 1984: https://t.co/GsXCZ70qx1
In Italy, there've been outbreaks of tarantism https://t.co/QGq9VAybjt

In which people compulsively dance until exhaustion, dehydration, and death.
Resignation syndrome among Swedish children, who go into a dissociative catatonic state https://t.co/sABPjuP4zs
Piblokto among Inuit women, deserves a mention.

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
What it amounts to is common sense: you don't live in a vacuum. Paranoid delusions, compulsions, hallucinations, all are shaped by your culture.

You should expect there to be different presentations of various mental illnesses in different places.
Just think about night terrors over time.

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.
So: culture influences presentation. It shapes the models you adopt, how you behave. This is common sense.
Which leads, of course, to zombies.

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.
If you wanted to realistically cause at least a limited zombie outbreak, you probably could do it by inducing a mass psychogenic illness in the US.

No rage virus or space radiation or 2-4-5 trioxin needed. Just stress, applied at the right points.
Basically, every recorded instance of a mass psychogenic illness occurred among people experiencing stress of some sort. Check out a list: https://t.co/LkoDVgRO5Z
William Byrd High School in 2007, multiple schools in Afghanistan in 2009, LeRoy High School in 2011, the 2016 evil clowns, etc

Stress, in the right conditions, does interesting things.
You simply need to find a small group of vulnerable, stressed people, and allow them an outlet to relieve that stress.

Schools and convents have historically been perfect breeding grounds for this.
Find that vulnerable, stressed group, your petri dish.

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.
And then, spike their stress to 11.

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.
At that critical moment of shared stress, in that vulnerable group of people who have zombies on their mind, offer them an outlet.

Have one kid pretend to bite another. Use squibs for realism, call in a favor from Tom Savini or something.
And voila. With any luck, your stressed-out little guinea pigs will relieve that stress in the most natural, intuitive way they can: acting like zombies.
If you think that's far fetched, read up on some of those historical incidents I linked above.

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.
They danced, or laughed, or meowed, or attacked their neighbors, because that was in their zeitgeist. Their culture informed the way that stress was relieved.

And in American culture, the zombie is standing right there as a perfect outlet.
In recent times, almost all such outbreaks have occurred in schools, or cramped workshops. Look up the June Bug epidemic.
What this means is, odds are you could create a local, contained zombie outbreak.

You could call it Quisling Syndrome, after the similar condition in the book World War Z.
Could you make it spread beyond your petri dish of stressed out people?

Well, look again at the 2016 evil clowns, and how one of the forgotten plotlines in 2020 was that they'd returned.
If those meowing nuns had had social media, I guarantee you every monastery and convent would have ended up with a case of the meows.
I guarantee you that your little, local outbreak would go viral on tiktok and instagram, it'd be everywhere the same way the Great Bathsalts Zombie story was.

Speaking of which: notice how readily and hungrily people ate that up? How excited they were to see it?
And that is how you easily, cheaply, and entirely realistically create a zombie outbreak without ever needing to do illegal biochemical experiments. Any jackass could do it.

If you do it, buy me some rice to thank me: https://t.co/TRTsg6UUwh

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@pookleblinky
An interesting take on zombies would be a virally mediated analgesia.

This kind of zombie plague has already happened before. Leprosy-induced neuropathy has been a thing for all of human history.

You'd just need to improve upon it.

Imagine getting a terrible flu, and after a high fever, discovering you can no longer perceive pain.

Imagine 30% of a population acquiring analgesia.

There's a reason people born with congenital analgesia don't often survive childhood, and why leprosy is so lethal.

Such an analgesia plague would hit poor people the hardest.

Restaurant workers scalding their forearms down to the muscle, warehouse workers not noticing they've crushed toes, etc

Hospitals would fill with people who'd suffered minor injuries of all kinds that'd gotten infected.

Or people who'd let illnesses go ignored until far too late.
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Anosognosiogenesis
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@pookleblinky
"Only true patriots are willing to commit treason and attempt to secede. You're the one's committing treason and seceding, not us."

This is now turning into a mainstream GOP platform.

"you're the one committing sedition. We are upholding the constitution by violating it."

Given how every *single* GOP position is doublethink, I propose that all their positions be given in the form of both competing beliefs.

Reporting on a republican saying X? You have to report on him also vehemently rejecting X.

No separating these contradictions into separate articles.

"He said X. He also denied X."

"He said his opponent was doing Y. He also stated his willingness to do Y."

Make that contradictory clusterfuck of an ideology as plain as possible, every chance you get.

Do not help them give the illusion of having a coherent ideology or position.
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@pookleblinky
So you want to generate interesting melodies.

1. Make a file called 1235.txt containing, one per line, all 24 unique permutations of the elements 1 2 3 5.


2. Cp 1235.txt to D.txt

3. Use sed to convert the numbers in D.txt to notes. Now you have 24 permutations of the major tetrachord in D.

4. Play them each. If it sounds like it increases tension, mark the beginning of that cell in 1235.txt with a +. If it sounds like it decreases tension, mark with a -.

Now those 24 melodic cells are divided into two groups: tension increasers and resolvers.

5. Rinse and repeat for all 12 keys.

You now have 13 plaintext files, filled with stuff like + 1 2 5 3 and - D E F# A

6. Figuratively roll dice to decide, given a +/- cell, what the next cell should be.

33% chance a + follows a +, etc.

Now you're outputting a stream of dynamic tensions: ++-+++-+-+---+ etc
CULTURE
Anosognosiogenesis
Anosognosiogenesis
@pookleblinky
Here's an interesting ncbi article on rage:

One of the claims argued, is that frustration triggers rage.

Either frustration from behaviour not producing expected outcomes, or frustration from someone not doing what one asks.

And, you can experimentally trigger rage by frustrating people sufficiently.

Get someone to do something in order to get a reward. Suddenly stop rewarding them for that. Bam, frustration and then rage.


Alternatively, pair your test subjects, ask them to cooperate to accomplish a task, and have your inside guy not listen.

Bam, frustration and then rage.


The thwarting of expectations is the common theme. Thwart someone's expectations, violate their model of how things work, and you frustrate them.

Keep at it, and you enrage them.
HEALTH
Anosognosiogenesis
Anosognosiogenesis
@pookleblinky
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
POLITICS

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1.Professor Marvin H. Mills, a leading New York architect and professor of architecture at the Pratt Institute had studied the Taj Mahal in detail. Here is part of his letter published in The New York Times. 👇👇

2.“New information and analysis have come forth to constitute a compelling argument that the Taj was actually a former Hindu palace occupied and converted to a tomb by the Moguls…There are many other inconsistencies in the Taj legend. The building to its left is now a mosque.

3.Had it been built originally as a mosque it would almost certainly have been oriented directly to Mecca,instead of due west.The four“minarets”that surround Taj mausoleum r inappropriate,for they logically should have been in front of the“mosque”for convenient calls to prayer.”

4.Through the letter, he had appealed thus, “The origin of the Taj can best be determined through scientific dating by carbon-14 and thermoluminescence, which the Archeological Survey of India should be urged to undertake.”
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The Panch Kedar Mandirs are amongst the most divine pilgrimage sites for followers of Sanatan Dharm. Apart from being Bhagwan Shiv`s abodes, they bear a strong connection to our history. Let`s explore their origins. #Thread


As per legend, the Panch Kedar Mandir relate directly to the Mahabharat and are an important part of our history. At the time of Mahabharat after the Kurukshetra Yudh, the Pandavs committed the sin of “Gotra Hatya” and “Brahmanahatya” by killing the Kauravs and Guru Droṇacarya.


Wanting to repent, Pandavs handed over the control of their kingdom to their kin and left in search of Bhagwan Shiv to ask for his forgiveness. Initially the Pandavs went to Kashi in search of Bhagwan Shiv but couldn`t find him there.


Bhagwan Shiv was furious at the deceit, death and destruction taking place during the Kurukshetra war. He was indifferent to the Pandavs prayers and took the form of a powerful bull and hid in the Gharwal Himalayas.


As Pandavs did not find Bhagwan Shiv in Kashi, after wandering for a bit they went to Gharwal Himalayas. The second eldest Pandav Bhim spotted a large bull grazing near GuptKashi in Kedar Kantha.
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Ronald Reagan called Medicare & Medicaid dangerous socialism in 1961... he was a right winger of the Barry Goldwater variety, not the warm and fuzzy presidential muppet he has become in his canonization by the 1980s Alex P. Keatons in the commentariat.

Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, just 16 years after Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were lynched there, 17 years after Medgar Evers' slaying and 12 years after Dr. King's assassination.

He did it send a message to white voters, not different from the message Donald Trump sent. He was letting white people who were resentful of civil rights advances know whose side he was on, further codifying the GOP as America's white interests party.

Reagan gutted what was left of the Great Society to shovel tax cuts into the pockets of the super rich. (My mother's federal job was deleted by his first presidential budget, though my absentee father was a big Reagan fan. Needless to say they divorced).

Reagan tried to ignore the AIDS pandemic which killed more people than Trump's COVID pandemic has. He just didn't give it the time of day, even though at the time, it was something seemingly everyone thought about, talked about and was terrified of.
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