Fangirl, biologist, feminist, bisexual cis woman. 40+ years old. Forever appreciating cartoons and fanworks. Trans rights are human rights. Married to th3d0ct0r13. Fan of: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Sailormoon, Fullmetal Alchemist, They Might Be Giants, Hellboy comics, Steven Universe, Undertale, OK KO, '90s Disney cartoons, Marvel's Loki
bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”
I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:
something needs to change here
this is urgent
I don’t know how to do it
death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.
you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.
this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.
A very similar approach is also the main focus of Kate Bernstein’s Hello, Cruel World. Besides the free “lite” version she put out (linked there), the whole book is available to borrow on archive.org.
I remember someone saying “mad scientists in fiction aren’t scientists because there’s never a control group”
I think if you’ve created an elixir that turns people into goat men you have sort have gone past the need for a control group. The control group is not going to placebo themselves into goat men. You can probably not run the control group, and safely assume that none of them would have turned into goat men. That said, having a control group for that would make the mad scientist seem extra crazy and be really really funny, especially if he was carefully testing them for goat like features from the dyed water they drank instead of the elixir
tbh: you should just take all of that first thread out of the oppenheimer post. it's a little bit of truth (a couple dozen families of hispanic homesteaders had their land seized via imminent domain and were unjustly compensated) coupled with a *lot* of b.s. or exaggeration (their livestock were SHOT, they were FORCED to work in berylium mines, white workers got protective gear but hispanic ones didn't, loyda martinez sued because of the beryliosis, etc. etc.)
Thank you for telling me. I only did a general check on whether the issue was real instead of whether each claim was true. My bad. I was only able to do a cursory Google search on those claims, which didn’t turn up anything, but Google is also pretty unreliable now. I’m beginning to doubt whether Alisa is a good faith actor though, which is a shame because it sabotages the surfacing of the violence done to New Mexico’s Hispanos. I disabled reblogs on the post until I could look into it in-depth.
In the meantime, here’s a source for the population impact and infant mortality of people caught downwind of the Trinity test:
“They’ll never reflect on the fact that New Mexicans gave their lives. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They invaded our lives and our lands and then they left,” Tina Cordova, a cancer survivor and founder of a group of New Mexico downwinders, said of the scientists and military officials who established a secret city in Los Alamos during the 1940s and tested their work at the Trinity Site some 200 miles (322 kilometers) away.
Jesus Christ. There’s a book called The Plutonium Files written about the experiments conducted for The Manhattan Project. From the Wikipedia article:
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What. The fuck. I’d never be lax about unverified claims, but you can see why shooting livestock and the forced labour of native landholders doesn’t stretch believability to a lot of people.
!!!! Yes this! We know that the test sites are settings in the film. It’s not just shitty to omit it but it leaves this really nasty impression of “Oh well nobody KNEW,” which is absolutely inaccurate to reality. They didn’t know people would get leukemia in a decade, maybe, but you bet the military knew whether or not an area was populated before conducting a highly secretive and sensitive operation there. And they did not tell people about it.
I also don’t get the choices stated in the reviews to not depict the physical aftermath of the bomb in Japan, including stuff Oppenheimer himself obviously would’ve known about because he advocated against the use of the bomb in future. To be clear, he only had the guilt kick in later, and pushed for full-scale bombing in 1945. They have a “hallucination of his interior world falling apart” when the bomb is dropped according to a (glowing) Polygon review, for example, but given that Oppenheimer did in fact go to Japan in the 60s (though he declined an invitation to visit Hiroshima).
It took about a year until after the bombs were dropped on Japan for the general public to have access to images and videos of the bombings (taken and suppressed by the military), and John Hersey, a war reporter, also published a long piece describing the aftermath on the ground in graphic detail the same year. Even assuming the real life Oppenheimer had no extra informational access from his association with the military and government, if the film goes through the Cold War persecution of anti-nuclear (& primarily Jewish) scientists under McCarthy, there’s no reason to assume he’d never have seen or heard anything about it. And there is a lot of footage, photographs etc—you wouldn’t have to recreate it for a movie. That omission is deliberate.
This Mother Jones review about how it refuses to take modern historians’ work into account in order to promote outdated claims about how “necessary” the bomb was (making and using):
First on Trinity:
Notably, the new film barely touches on arguments that were expressed back then, not in retrospect, against using the bomb. Ditto the deadly radiation the new weapon produced, and the secrecy that surrounded it—starting with the Trinity test, when a radioactive cloud drifted over nearby villagers who were not warned, and were then lied to about the fallout effects. This combination of lethality and secrecy would have extensive and tragic results in the decades after Hiroshima.
Straight up barely mentioning Nagasaki, the more “controversial” bombing (even some people who argue the bombing of Hiroshima was wholly necessary bullshit have qualms about if leveling a second city was ‘too much’ and one city was ‘enough’)
Nagasaki’s fate is also ignored, save three or four brief and rather forced mentions in the final hour of the picture… In real life, it was the death toll from that second bomb that got to Oppenheimer’s conscience—however ambivalent he remained about the bomb’s deployment more broadly.
And on the “no other options” myth:
But Nolan’s most significant failing lies in not confronting—and in some ways sustaining—the popular narrative around the decision to drop the bombs, one that endures in government and media circles and among many historians, and is thereby reflected in public opinion polls.
That narrative holds that it was the detonation of the two bombs, and only that, which brought the Pacific war to an end. Simple cause-and-effect. The key scene in this regard in Nolan’s film, largely accurate, depicts the late-May 1945 meeting of the Interim Committee, President Harry Truman’s top advisory panel on the matter. One or two advisers question the necessity of deploying such a terrible weapon against Japanese cities, but their doubts are silenced by an officer who insists the Japanese won’t surrender otherwise, and a host of American soldiers will then have to die storming the country’s beaches. The panel is reminded of how savagely the Japanese have fought to the last man in other circumstances.
When one attendee suggests using a “demonstration” blast instead to compel a Japanese surrender, Oppenheimer shoots this down. The Japanese will only give up, he argues, if they see the full, city-destroying effects of the bomb. And suppose it’s a dud? Or, forewarned by a demonstration blast, the Japanese are able to track and shoot down the bomber shuttling the real thing? Another panelist remarks that he might very well be in that plane. End of argument.
These arguments form the core of the story that has held sway since 1945, despite new evidence and compelling arguments raised by numerous historians. From Nolan’s movie, you’d never know that many historians today believe that if Truman had waited just three days after Hiroshima for the Soviets to enter the war as the US insisted, the Japanese would likely have surrendered in about the same time frame. (That bloody invasion cited in the movie was still more than three months off.) Truman himself wrote in his diary in mid-July, after the Trinity test, that when the Soviet Union declared war it would mean “Fini J*ps”—even without the bomb.
(emphasis & slur-censor mine)
And this bit which honestly makes for a good TL;DR
The main takeaway, relayed with passion and never contradicted, is that the bomb prevented an invasion, saved countless US lives, and ended the war. Yes, many Japanese died, and the script eventually puts a number on it, but Nolan fails to point out that 85 percent were civilians. Oppenheimer’s ambiguous qualms—mainly about making bigger bombs after Hiroshima—do little to disrupt the powerful central narrative.
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