Brian South

Teacher, writer, evil genius

[Sean T at RCP @SeanTrende]

I almost hesitate to promote this, because it wasn't really intended to be a piece. I just sort of sat down and it came out. Maybe someone else out there has the same type of day today, and it'll speak to them.
https://t.co/xSMUDOrHcC

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Many of them didn't. Your great-great-grandmother was probably drinking opium for her nerves, sold at the corner shop as cheap as a pint of beer. It was called laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol that doctors handed out for anxiety, sleeplessness, and "women's troubles." Mothers fed it to crying babies. The babies often stopped crying because they stopped breathing.

The men drank. By 1830 the average American was putting away almost two bottles of liquor a week. Whiskey cost less than coffee or milk. People started their day with a shot and ended it with another. Toddlers drank from their parents' rum mugs.

ADHD has a long paper trail. A Scottish doctor described kids who couldn't focus in 1798. By 1846 there was a popular German children's book about a boy called Fidgety Philipp who couldn't sit still. In 1902, a London children's doctor named George Still wrote a famous paper on the same kids and called it a "defect of moral control." Same kid, three different centuries.

Depression and anxiety had old names too. Melancholia, hysteria, the vapors. Treatments included bloodletting, ice baths, and chaining people to a wall. By 1937, American mental hospitals held 451,672 patients and took up more than half of every hospital bed in the country. Inside the walls, about 1 in 10 patients died each year.

Then came the lobotomy. Between 1949 and 1952, around 50,000 Americans were strapped to a chair while a doctor hammered an ice pick through the thin bone above their eye and wiggled it around inside their brain. It took about ten minutes. Sixty percent of the patients were women. About 1 in 20 died from the procedure. Many of the ones who lived came out with no personality left. The man who invented the procedure won a Nobel Prize.

Britain's male suicide rate hit 30.3 per 100,000 in 1905. The lowest rates ever recorded in British history are happening right now.

Plenty of our ancestors didn't make it. They drank themselves dead. They overdosed on shop-bought opium. They got locked in asylums and never came out. They had picks driven through their eye sockets. They killed themselves in numbers we don't see today. The conditions were always there. The treatments just used to be worse than the disease.

[Vince Mpls @vincempls]

The epicenter of this Midwestern cultural phenomenon is Minnesota, where the "long goodbye" can take days. The definitive guide by Howard Mohr aired on @tpt in 1992. No one before or since has ever explained it better than this:

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

@jpodhoretz I strongly suspect those criticizing this list haven't read the books on it...

[Adrienne LaFrance @AdrienneLaF]

It’s okay for hard things to be hard. On the subject of AI and writing, I like the way George Saunders puts it:

[Acyn @Acyn]

Mace: I hope you learned some lessons from your last hearing.

Walz: I did—that if I didn’t speak up, two of my people would be dead.

Mace: Ok, what is a woman?

Walz: I’m the governor of Minnesota, I’m not here to be the prop for your obsession.

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

@MollyJongFast The kids' table.

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

There has been no harsher critic to U.S. military action in Iran than Pope Leo XIV:

“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.  The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.

“Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.”

“Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.

“This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

[Ruben Gallego @RubenGallego]

Trump ran on exposing the pedophiles and stopping wars. Trump is now protecting the pedophiles and starting wars. #maga

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

@KatieMiller How have you kept this tweet up?

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

ICE protest in Elgin, IL. Temperature: 13 degrees. #ICEOutForGood #BuildTheResistance #AbolishICE

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

This is who our government is calling a “monster” and a “domestic terrorist.”
Lies travel fast when violence needs cover

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

@SenatorDurbin Good for you, sir!

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

@JakeSherman Also a nightmare for the fucking country, Jake.

[Brian South @stanhubrio]

@StephenM How do you live with yourself?

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

Both of his arms were on the ground in front of him.

The agents could see both of his hands, and he never went for a weapon, even while they were kicking his ass.

The administration is lying to you. They want you to believe them over your eyes.

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

Appears to be a video of ICE killing a man on the street.

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

“we may or may not invade you every four years depending on how worked up ~20,000 swing voters in Waukesha County, Wisconsin feel about trans kids playing volleyball” isn’t really a good sales pitch for maintaining international allies.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Brian Kilmeade endorses euthanizing homeless people: "Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them."