We’re discussing this same thing over on Hexbear and my contention is that it’s actually Tito because he’s wearing a Yugoslavian partisan’s cap. I’m used to seeing older portraits of Tito but the artwork seems to have a pretty close resemblance to the younger Tito:

I vaguely recall doing the exact same myself

So why homeschool your kids then?

One lion has their mom providing their kid 1:1 tutoring every minute of the day, catering all of their education to the child and thus making them captive and domesticated, setting their expectations for a world which will always attend to their every fleeting whim and one where they rarely experience the world beyond their own house.

The other lion has to fend for themselves and take on their responsibility of learning in the wilderness of a classroom filled with 20-30 other students who are all competing to get their various needs met in a classroom led by an underpaid, undersupported, underresourced teacher who is burned out and who cannot possibly provide a rich education for all their students.

Homeschooling is, like, putting a lion in a cage or something. [Insert images here]

What interested you in this book club?

I have read through this book a couple of times and I think it’s really valuable. It’s a bit flawed imo and I hope that in a few years time we’ll see a revised edition come out to bring it up to speed with a couple of things but 90% good is still really good, even moreso when we’re talking about stuff that there’s almost nothing having been written about.

Don’t ask me about my criticisms of the book because I don’t want to prime people to dislike this book and I don’t want to shit on the experience for others or to drag the book club experience down. Maybe when the book club comes to a conclusion it might be time to reflect on where the book could be improved.

I’m also interested in this book club because I volunteered to share my experience - I participated in training developed and delivered by Heather Morgan that formed the basis of the unmasking exercises and it cost a fair chunk of change and the rest of the group I was with were all… sorta petit-bourgeois life coach types and I just know that to get access to this stuff otherwise, people would be looking at having to start as a client with a life coach and that shit costs like $100+ per session.

That doesn’t really sit well with me and I know that it puts this expertise out of reach for a lot of people here. I’ve railed against how fucked it is that neurodivergent people are generally higher represented in unemployment and underemployment, they are likely to be underpaid for their work, and they tend to have higher costs for things like therapy, medication, and accessibility (think like needing a house cleaner or having to order food delivered because executive dysfunction has you in its claws and you need to eat but the idea of trying to cook something might as well be climbing mount Everest or just having to catch a taxi because the ADHD tax made you run late for work and you’re better off paying the taxi fare than you are getting fired…)

The inequity of putting this stuff behind an inaccessible paywall isn’t something I find tolerable. Don’t get me wrong, people like Devon Price and Heather Morgan deserve to be paid for their work but the inherent injustice of the care system and the economic system underpinning it puts the expertise out of reach of most people who aren’t at least comfortably “middle class” and it makes me feel indignation to know that the people who would likely benefit the most from this stuff are the ones who are also the most likely to be excluded from it.

I can’t change the way that it is but I can do my part to democratise this expertise.

Are you neurodiverse? Do you know someone who is?

Yep. I’m autistic with ADHD, late-diagnosed, and enough of the “other” neurodivergence that tends to be a bit of an afterthought in comparison to autism and ADHD too.

As for others? Lol. Where to start… there are quite a few neurodivergent people I know, despite having a limited social circle at the moment. I’ve been the catalyst for more than a couple of people to go and get themselves diagnosed but I promise that I was very gentle in this process with people - I know that late-diagnosis can be one hell of a bumpy ride and I wouldn’t go throwing someone else into the deep end with that, regardless of how obvious their neurodivergence might be to me.

What stood out to you about the introduction? Any choice quotes? Anything you relate to?

Honestly I haven’t started re-reading the book just yet (😬) because I struggle so damn much with reading especially at the moment.

I’m participating in this because I want to contribute to the momentum of the reading group and to show my support.

[CW: mild discussions of child abuse used in the context of analogy]

Sure, I’m about to sleep and I’m a bit flat today so if there’s anything I have realised that I’ve missed I’ll post another comment so you’ll get notified but also feel free to ask if I’m not being as clear as you need.

I’m going to put the explanation for the process here. I guess spoiler warning(?) but tbh there’s nothing that will get spoiled by understanding the process better unless someone is planning to intentionally sabotage a self-conducted exercise but if that’s the case then there’s bigger stuff to worry about than encountering a spoiler for this.

So the heart of the exercise is based on the understanding that masking is a fundamental disconnection from your “authentic” self (I hate that term but we’re going to use it for shorthand in this case.)

This fundamental disconnection from yourself leaves you feeling a variety of negative things - being without direction or purpose, feelings of emptiness or meaninglessness, depression, anxiety etc. and ultimately doing things not from a place of what you need, what you want, and what is in line with your true values but instead it’s doing things from a place of internalised expectations placed upon you by others (individuals, family, community, society, the media etc.)

The opposite of this is feeling a strong connection to your authentic self and doing things that are in harmony with yourself, your needs, your desires, and your values.

What comes from this strong connection to your authentic self and acting upon it is feeling enlivened, something that is likely quite rare for a late-diagnosed or undiagnosed autistic adult.

To try to connect a person who is high-masking to their authentic selves is difficult because each facet of their masking is typically very strongly associated with external expectations, even if they’ve been internalised by the individual, and so asking a high-masking autistic person “What is most important to you?” is a bit like asking an abused child what a healthy relationship looks like - you’re going to get answers that are primarily filtered through their experience (either of abuse or of masking) and what has developed in response to that rather than something deeper.

So for a high-masking autistic person, if you asked them straight up what they value then they’re very inclined to give you answers that come from a place of meeting the expectations of others or ways to avoid experiencing rejection/ridicule/humiliation etc. from others.

This isn’t really a connection to the authentic self, however. This would just be an exercise in articulating the necessity for masking and the reasons why masking is important. (Obviously this is the complete opposite of what the exercise is supposed to achieve.)

As an analogy, an abused child might tell you that a healthy relationship is one where neither party has arguments. This would be because they’ve associated arguments with threat and suffering. But if we took that child and they used that as their basis for achieving a healthy relationship then you end up with an adult who will constantly compromise on their own needs, who will avoid conflict at any cost, and who doesn’t know how to achieve conflict resolution but only appeasement; they might have achieved a relationship that is minimal-conflict but that alone is not a recipe for a healthy relationship because there is necessarily going to be a degree of conflict that comes from asserting things like needs and boundaries, and so it’s not unusual to have arguments in relationships. In fact a relationship where there are never any arguments is usually a good indication that there’s something really amiss.

So to circumvent getting answers about values and purpose “from the mask” and instead from the authentic self, the exercise asks you to identify times when you felt strongly connected to your authentic self on an experiential level - hence the question about moments when you felt really alive.

Once a few experiences have been identified from that place of feelings very alive - from being connected to and acting upon your authentic self - then the next step is to develop an understanding of what values were being enacted or embodied during these experiences to draw out what really matters to you as a person so that you can start to find ways to reconnect with yourself and to embody your authentic values in your life.

If masking is basically like method acting (and in a lot of ways it really is) and you ask the method actor what they are feeling, they’re going to tell you what their character is feeling. In a similar way, if you ask a high-masking autistic what they value they’re going to tell you what is important to their masking. A method actor is capable of switching all of that off though. On the other hand, a high-masking autistic person might not even realise that they are masking or understand what’s beneath the mask. So the exercise is designed to try and catch those (often rare) moments when you haven’t been performing the mask but rather embodying and enacting your authentic self and connecting to that outside of masking (even if you aren’t able to identify that you weren’t masking at the time) in order to draw out what that looks like so you can set about actively pursuing this in your life going forwards.

It’s important to note that the exercise is like a short summary of what the process really is and the process is something that ideally takes place over the course of more than a few hours of discussion and self-reflection and stuff like that.

Anyway, I hope that makes some sense.

It’s difficult to describe an experiential process like this, especially because it’s necessarily going to be different for each individual, so apologies if it still seems vague or confusing.

If you are struggling with this process I just want to let you know that you aren’t alone, there isn’t something wrong with you if you’re having difficulty doing this exercise, and that everything is okay. You won’t miss out on getting stuff from reading this book even if you struggle with this exercise or if you can’t do it at the moment. The process of unmasking can be confronting and challenging; if it was easy then we’d already be doing it instead of needing to read books and exercises on it even just to get started on our unmasking journey.

Anyway, that’s a lot of rambling on.

I’m going to try and check in on how you’re feeling about this exercise in about a week’s time but I’m terrible for forgetting things and letting them slip off my radar. I’d encourage you to reach out to me if you don’t see me replying to this comment in about a weekor if it’s between then and now and you would appreciate some more input from me.

I hope this has helped clarify things a bit!

Thanks, that’s a big compliment.

I think the general awareness of ADHD is abysmally low and, not to shit on any particular doctor (let alone a specialist 😬) but if I encounter someone who is AFAB and late-diagnosed/undiagnosed autistic then that’s gonna raise a hell of a lot of flags for needing to investigate before you’d be able to either rule an ADHD diagnosis in or out.

Women are much more likely to go undiagnosed for ADHD. Whether it’s due to socialisation or it’s a distinct behavioural difference or something in between, ADHD women tend to fly under the radar.

Adult ADHDers, especially the undiagnosed and late-diagnosed, also fly under the radar because they are much less likely to exhibit the hyperactivity and the outward signs of impulsivity that are easy to catch for the purposes of diagnosis, not to mention that they tend to have developed all sorts of coping strategies to conceal and compensate for ADHD throughout their lives.

ADHD in autism was, until recently, not even “permitted” to be diagnosed formally and there’s a desperate need for better research and education amongst healthcare providers on this. The combination of autism and ADHD is, imo, unlike either autism or ADHD by itself and when co-occuring it’s not nearly as simple as just the combination of the two.

But the combination of all three of these factors together in one person?

Yeah, I’m not sure even the foremost experts in ADHD would be able to identify ADHD in a case like that on the first session…

Idk. I’m not a doctor and I’m not an expert or anything like that but I would encourage your wife to do a screening test outside of the NP’s direction or to get her to come up with a list of symptoms that she’s identified that seem to map onto ADHD to take to the NP so she can make a case for herself. Otherwise it might require seeing a different doc because, unfortunately, some of them are just a bit outdated or they have preconceptions about these things.

Anyway, I hope my input has been helpful and hit me up anytime if you ever need my input in future. Good luck with it!

I have fond memories of drinking myself halfway into a stupor with kava in my younger days which was no mean feat. I’m very keen on the stuff.

Just make sure that you take a few days break every week if you’re consuming it regularly. Chronic consumers of kava can develop a (reversible) skin condition but you’d need to be drinking it like you’re living on a Pacific island before that’s likely to happen.

It’s been a while since I’ve dug into the literature on kava but the risk of liver damage is completely overblown - it may cause an elevation in particular liver enzymes, especially with heavy or chronic consumption but there hasn’t been any actual links to liver damage. In countries where kava consumption is commonplace, they tend not to consume the root whole but instead drink the extract from the root using water and so there’s some hypotheses that consuming the root whole rather than just the extract may cause elevated liver enzymes and potentially lead to liver damage so if you’re going to make it a regular thing then I’d veer on the safer side and make an extract the way that it’s traditionally done rather than taking capsules of whole powdered root or something similar like that.

But, all in all, in regards to safety if you’re consuming it occasionally for recreational purposes the risk is very minimal. We’re talking like less risk than smoking cannabis here.

If the person who edited this video was familiar with Spanish they could have gotten an amazing joke in at the mention of the word “mariposa” by censoring out the last bit and having the video play out so he says “Mari[bleep]. The Spanish word for [bleep].”

Truly a missed opportunity 😔

Speaking from anecdotal reports from autistic people, SSRIs generally don’t seem to go over well with autistic people.

If your partner is autistic and suspects that they’re ADHD as well that’s not uncommon, with the estimated rates of ADHD occurring in autistic folks being at around 20-40%.

If your partner is ADHD or suspects being ADHD then PMDD is extremely common as dopamine drops due to hormone changes around menstruation.

Without writing a whole piece on something when I don’t have the spoons for it, serotonin can compete in the brain with dopamine and SSRIs can reduce dopamine transmission.

If we go by a hypothesis that your partner is correct about PMDD and ADHD, what we should expect to see from an SSRI would be an aggravation of their PMDD and a deterioration of their mental health overall, all things being equal.

If your partner is looking for a better alternative in the antidepressant class, venlafaxine is likely the best bet as it is an SNRI with dopaminergic effects at higher dosages. Venlafaxine can be combined relatively safely with mirtazapine, which is unusual for antidepressants, and this may boost the effects on the PMDD symptoms or other symptoms - this combination is well known as a potent treatment for depression that is not responding well to other antidepressants.

Bupropion is the other candidate to consider as it has a desirable effect on both norepinephrine and dopamine for an ADHDer although the evidence for it treating PMDD shows that it is less effective than venlafaxine.

If we’re throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, agomelatine is an antidepressant that is unique in that it’s the only one that has been shown to have a side effect profile lesser than placebo and it doesn’t cause withdrawals so it’s possible to stop it without tapering down. There’s little to no evidence establishing it as a suitable treatment for PMDD but I figured that it was worth an honourable mention given the concerns that you have identified.

But with all this said, it takes a psychiatrist to really understand these things and it requires good knowledge of the case history of the patient to be able to determine what would really work best, and even then it’s still a bit of a guessing game as neurochemistry is very complex and it’s more of an art than a science to figure out what would work for any given person for reasons I won’t bother going into here.

Honestly though, if your partner is an ADHDer or suspects that they have ADHD then really their best bet is stimulants because antidepressants rarely manage to treat ADHD symptoms by themselves.

I would urge caution about jumping to conclusions about psychiatric meds - the nervous system is both extremely complicated and also kind of simple in the sense that it relies on a few key things in order to achieve a lot (well, basically everything…) which means that tweaking the levels of one thing in the nervous system often has major flow-on effects for other parts of the system, like it or not. Add to that the fact that meds like antidepressants almost always have a really broad effect across the brain, not to mention across a lot of different neurotransmitters as well, and it starts getting really, really complicated.

Throw into the mix the fact that an individual might have an abnormal amount of receptors or transporters in any particular part of the brain and this may cause a “deficit”, not in the neurotransmitter itself but a sort of shortfall compared to “demand”, and thus treating this shortfall usually entails broad spectrum treatment which can increase the neurotransmitters elsewhere in the brain which can easily cause side effects worse than what the particular medication is treating.

It’s just really, really complicated. Add into that that one person’s depression might be due to low serotonin, another’s might be due to low norepinephrine, another’s might be due to low dopamine… or likely some combination of these and the complexity gets kinda staggering to try and wrap your head around.

If you’ve ever played one of those puzzle games where flicking one switch turns other ones on/off and you have to make a path or turn all of one row to a particular setting, that’s what psychiatric meds are like - you often don’t get a grasp of how one change affects the rest of the system and it often takes a few tries until you even understand what you’re dealing with and to develop a good plan for how to proceed.

I guess I’m trying to say that antidepressants have a long list of side effects because they typically affect a lot of systems, especially in the brain, and typically a lot of different chemicals in the brain in different ways. It’s easy to get spooked by this or to become very cynical about it (believe me, I understand this very well personally) but I’d try to withhold from making snap judgements.

There’s hardly a medication out there that doesn’t have horror stories attached to it but then again the same could easily be said for all sorts of common foods that we eat - caffeine can trigger mania in some people with bipolar, gluten can make someone so sick that they’re incapacitated for days, there’s a particular amino acid that can cause brain damage for people with a certain condition meaning that they have to carefully restrict their protein intake, salt could be enough to cause a particular person to have a heart attack, heck in situations of heart failure your fluid ntake is restricted…

If we went by horror stories caused by the effects of dietary intake then we would be avoiding salt, sugar, wheat, protein, dairy, water, carbohydrates, fats… it’s hard to imagine a single thing that would be considered safe.

Maybe some Kim Stanley Robinson?

The values-integration process was a little uncomfortable.

To try to think of 5 times when I felt that was is challenging to a lot of my preconceptions.

That’s understandable.

I participated in the training that Heather Morgan authored/delivered which the book’s exercise is a distillation of and it was challenging for me as well (I have a pretty extensive history of childhood trauma).

What I’d encourage you to do is to not focus so much on coming up with 5 but instead just try to come up with a couple. They don’t need to be some huge watershed moments in your life, they can also be “small” experiences that resonated with you.

I can elaborate on the purpose of this exercise if you feel like understanding it better would be helpful for you.

It might be worth discussing this exercise with someone who you trust because if you’re high masking or you’re carrying a lot of trauma then it can be difficult to recall moments where you’ve experienced this in your life but talking it through with another person might be helpful.

Surprisingly, Biden appointing Adriano Celentano as speechwriter will be looked back upon as being one of the better decisions made by his administration.

I have reuploaded the audiobook here:

https://litter.catbox.moe/5l45c0.m4b

This will expire in 72 hours after this comment has been posted as per last time due to the catbox limitations.

I will not return from Gaza…

Correct!

I’d put the lede at the front:

US coalition launches full-scale assault on Iran in response to cruise missile strikes from Houthi controlled territory on at least 20 Saudi oil refineries

Or alternatively for something less verbose:

Missiles from Houthi controlled territory strike 20+ Saudi oil refineries, US coalition responds with full-scale assault on Iran

Glad to hear that you’re doing better!

The saying “Money can’t buy you happiness” may have some truth to it but it completely misses the point because money can buy you out of all sorts of misery.

I’m guessing it’s cold where you are. Have you ever thought about insulating your shack so that it stays warmer?

You can do a lot, even on a shoestring budget. A can of spray foam would seal up any big gaps in your shack and you could even step it up a notch by getting foil-backed insulation. Hardware stores sell construction insulation boards but often that can be pricey. As an alternative, you can get what is essentially a roll of bubble wrap which has emergency blanket material bonded to it on one side.

It’s stuff that looks like this:

The material is extremely light, it’s cheap, and it’s easy to manage. You’d be able to glue it up or attach it to your shack using stuff like nails, thumbtacks, or staples (construction staples tend to be expensive but a regular stapler might be able to get through the walls in your shack if the wood is soft enough.) A layer of duct tape across any gaps or seams would improve the insulation even more.

I’ve found rolls of this insulation for next to nothing at my local dollar stores such as Daiso.

Obviously this sort of material is not going to play well with open fires but if your shack is nice and cosy because it’s insulated then you might suit you better.

Idk if your shack has a door but if it doesn’t then a piece of closed-cell insulation board cut to size would work well as a makeshift interior door - something to keep the worst of the cold out. You might be able to scavenge a discarded fridge or freezer door to use as an exterior door too, although you’d probably need some tools to remove a fridge door from the hinge. If you don’t have any fabric or rope, you could twist up some duct tape and affix it to the door with tape or nails so that you could position the door in the right place when you’re inside your shack to keep out draughts.

Anyway, just a thought. If it sounds like something that you would like to do but it’s out of your budget then maybe it’d be worth putting up another post on here.

Wherever you are I hope that you’re safe and warm and that things keep improving for you!

The good thing is that type of anarchist doesn’t go outside, and certainly not to engage in activism, so you’re pretty safe.

This type of anarchist is courted by NAFO chuds and they tend to take people like Vaush, Dylan Burns, Animarchy, Destiny, and Keffals seriously.

You can tell that this is authentic because the “handwritten” double underline done in red is perfectly identical to the other red double underline in the image in OP’s post.

Solidarity is ✨magical✨ 😊