(no subject)

I've had trouble getting moving to do much of anything done today. May be coming down with the flu, judging by the shivering episodes. (Otherwise, I'd attribute things to allergies.) It's not very cold out there, and the heat's going in here. That would also explain the level of muscle spasms happening again, along with last night's nausea. vatine may be in for a Maxercise session after he gets home, since I haven't been able to traipse the poor dog around so far.

I did get something written on why my day-to-day difficulties have seemed to change: different kinds of support being available, besides having some new types of challenges in front of me. With any luck, it will get easier to work out some strategies for dealing with this.

On a vaguely related note, I was interested to run across something on motor planning and speech fluency. The first comment also helped confirm my impression of what's behind my requiring a couple of hours to wake up before I'm reasonably functional: it takes some motor systems a while to get up and running again. I hadn't considered that speech might be part of this. It's interesting that manual-motor skills were specifically considered, since after I wake up and when I'm seriously overloaded are the only times that I get fumble-fingered; stringing speech together coherently and being able to use my hands properly do seem to go together. It will be interesting to see further research in similar areas.

[Twitter] The daily ration

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Bullying, thinly disguised

Crossposted.

Looking over the comments here (Texas is only 6000 years old!), I am reminded yet again of why I usually skim them, at most.

Running into yet more Texan-bashing is hardly a surprise, just disheartening. Criticizing the power-hungry lunatics responsible for this kind of tripe is one thing, seizing on any opportunity to kick the victims while they're down is quite another. (Yeah, this doesn't just apply to Texas.)

Let's say that you notice that a group of people is being used and abused by one or more power-mad wingnuts of one persuasion or another, with anti-intellectualism as a favorite tool to try to keep them compliant. What is your response? Do you try to do something that might, erm, actually help the situation, or ease some of its effects? Do you take the bully's route, and decide that these people must somehow be deserving of whatever shoddy treatment they get? Do you poke fun at them, since you could never find yourself on the wrong end of that kind of abuse of power?

No, Barbara Cargill is not in the same league as Pol Pot. That does not make the interests she represents much less scary nor potentially abusive.

I keep telling myself that most of these responses owe more to dependence on skewed mental widgets--which my brain just doesn't seem to use, anyway--rather than to any real coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. Sometimes that just doesn't satisfy, though. It disturbs me that this almost passes for reasonable discourse.