If I drove a bulldozer through an apple store and the cops just shoved me in a closet and pumped me full of DMT for 8 hours id literally just do it again the second they let me out
This is like the best admission I’ve ever heard that prison sentences are about fucked up torture rather than keeping dangerous people out of society.
There’s literally an entire Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode about how effed up this concept is.
تريد الموت؟ إرم نفسك في البحر وستجد أنك تُصارع لتعيش، انت لا تريد قتل نفسك، انت فقط تريد قتل شيء ما بداخلك
“You want to die? Then throw yourself into the sea and you’ll see yourself fighting to survive. You do not want to kill yourself, rather you want to kill something inside of you.”
“For example: A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, ‘But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?’”
Not “I always knew I was different”, not “I thought it was normal”, but a secret third thing: it never occurred to me to think about whether it was normal until I was forced to, usually in a cruel way
