u/Leading_Respond8486

Margaret killed it, I hope this becomes a regular segment

American naturalists Mark and Delia Owens, using donations from wealthy individuals and conservation non-profits, funded, supplied, and commanded a force of park scouts in Zambia in a campaign of torture and murder, supposedly aimed at stopping poaching but targeting a lot of the local indigenous people for offenses such as having meat at home when they came to raid.

In 1996, ABC News aired an hour-long documentary on them, where no one much seemed to think there was anything wrong with the part where they filmed Mark's son and a scout murdering an African man they suspected of poaching. (Though they *did* know it was wrong enough to blur out the white man's identity and refuse to speak to the Zambian government.) The US Embassy instructed the Owenses to flee back to the US and not return before the Zambian government was able to bring them in for questioning.

In 2010, a reporter thoroughly detailed their guilt (link), but that apparently had little effect on them. In 2019, Delia published her debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, which was featured in Reese Witherspoon's book club and became one of the best-selling books in history as well as a successful film. The novel is about how it was unjust for a community to try a naturalist for a murder she gets acquitted of but actually did commit.

Kind of reminds me of Saville how many institutions of American society were/are involved in enabling and protecting these monsters.

"But saving money, even if it is by foregoing medication, is appealing in a country that was already the poorest in the Middle East before the civil war started more than a decade ago.

"“Most patients who stop taking their medication are either impoverished individuals who view the diet as an economic reprieve from high prescription costs, or those who lack the health literacy to critically evaluate online claims,” Dr Sadeq Aqlan, a cardiologist at the Republican Hospital, told Al Jazeera. “It is deeply disheartening to see them arrive in such critical states, requiring urgent medical examinations and aggressive therapeutic intervention to stabilise.”"

Jaw-dropping details in the article, like the price of eggs dropping by more than half because so many people are following the restrictive diet of a former doctor who lost his license.

Most of them got 50 years. Song, who shot the cop, got 100. Des, accused of concealing evidence for moving a box of zines, got 40 30 [updated] and his wife Mari got 70.

— Intro to Napoleon III

It's about time for Modernity 2.0, isn't it?

Yesterday, right after listening to the episode, I went out into public and overheard someone (looked like a woman in early 20s) on the phone talking about their diet and exercise routine:

"... and then I work out... And then no looking things up on ChatGPT. Because I used to eat something and then ask ChatGPT how many calories it had and how much of what exercises to do to work it off..."

When she started talking about her ChatGPT use in this way, her voice became more energetic and rapid and she was gesticulating wildly.

It's even just grim to me that the youth apparently think you can "look things up" on chatbots, not just ask questions and get possibly bullshit answers.

I'm glad that this person seemed to have noticed her unhealthy use and stopped it, but it made me realize it isn't just suicide and "psychosis" per se, but potentially any sort of obsessive spiral the bot could help send you down.