fascinated by the concept of a negative name: giving a baby a name that just means something bad

you go to these early childhood birthday parties. the kid’s first, second, third birthday. the children: angelic, luminous. the mothers: all beautiful. and then, and then there are the fathers: like working dogs dragged momentarily from battle.

this CGI image of the mid-1800s red room from the white house historical society has an insane vibe:

but this isnt present, to me, in modern pop psychology. as foucault (clearly correct about some things) made “power” his main currency, modern pop psychology seems to make “valid”-ness of emotions and feelings the main basis for assessing anything. in a real way, its amoral.

i dont think this is inherent to psychology or alternate psychological models and systems. some stuff i’ve looked into and benefited from dovetails with ethics or has its own ethics because, obviously, doing unethical stuff negatively affects the individual it is trying to help.

chomsky said when he met foucault that he was the most amoral person he ever met. not immoral (bad) but amoral: only concerned with power - who has it? how is it being used?. modern pop therapy culture has something similar. at no point does it intersect with an ethical framework.

kentucky is so spiritually similar to australia that there is a place called ‘kentucky down under’ where they keep australian animals and you can go hangout with them. this guy standing around two fighting kangaroos and some type of emu (?) is in kentucky:

you go to a guys house and his cats name is benjamin netanyahu, but he obviously kind of hates the cat, so you spend the whole time trying to infer his political views based on this.

today i am learning that people have very different interpretations of what would make someone a mad scientist.

crazy thing about buying used books is that i constantly get kids books, books for young people, any books, that are stamped as library or school property. obviously they got rid of them - but nothing is actually wrong with them. someone just decided they were no longer relevant.

the biggest indicator that something is seriously wrong with tech and science culture is that we have almost no true openly unhinged mad scientists. meanwhile religion continues to produce an endless sea of off-script and insane people.

this weeks laboratory posts are up btw. hope your weekend is going well