Here at dagny-hashtaggart we try to represent the fullness of the human emotional spectrum, including:

Song is Bad Apple by Touhou Project (ZUN, Alstroemeria, Masayoshi Minoshima, Nomico)

So here's a question: what does it mean to say that so-and-so is a wonderful person when sober, but that alcohol makes them a monster?

(This question is inspired by having just finished the Netflix series Maid, where it's basically the crux of the Sean character. Soon I might be posting a review of Maid, which I found engaging but deeply flawed in the character-writing.)

Speaking as someone who at one point in my life knew tons of people both in sober states and drunk states, I've come to a pretty clear conclusion since long ago that not only is one's drunk self not a separately compartmentalized person from one's sober self, but actually what comes out of someone when they're drunk (and thus less inhibited) is if anything a truer reflection of the kind of person they really are. Lovely people I've known become lovelier when drunk; douchey people I've known become downright a-holes when drunk. I know I'm no more capable of doing something horrible to someone when drunk than when sober. I guess I can't think of anyone I've known who seems genuinely lovely when sober but horrible when drunk (the closest I've seen is that some people's tempers are shorter when drunk, which I consider a different phenomenon), but I think if I did encounter someone like that in my life, I'd be able to connect their drunk behavior and personality with at least something subtly detectable in them when they're sober, just hidden under layers of conscious beliefs and care.

I've assumed that this is true of most other milder substances (there are some, which are highly addictive and euphoria-inducing, that make people into utility monsters and thus might turn a good person into an effectively evil one, but that's a different thing).

Now it's occurring to me I could be wrong. Maybe there are certain substances for certain people that act as a magical chemical trigger in the brain to drastically change whatever governs their fundamental morality. Maybe there's a particular combination of chemicals specially attuned to turning Liskantope into a terrible person while he's affected by them, and it just doesn't happen to be alcohol. But for some people, that chemical could be alcohol, which for them acts not only as a disinhibitor but by temporarily reconfiguring something more mysterious in their brains. I don't know. Until I see evidence of that, I'm going to continue judging people who are abusive and terrible while on the bottle as (at least in part) bad people.

i think someone who has a bunch of impulses to hurt people but controls these because they believe in doing the right thing should be judged inclusive of their selfcontrol

I have never been drunk partly because I have very different intellectual and instinctive feelings about violence.

(It is helpful that I don't like the taste of alcohol.)

I confess I don't find this notion of the true self especially useful or congruent with reality. Alcohol certainly tends to turn many people more toward their instinctual, pre-rational self, but I'm not convinced that this is more true in a meaningful sense than the self more consciously governed.

That aside, I think it's useful to distinguish between intention and action here. Alcohol doesn't drastically alter a person's intentions and inclinations for the most part, but the way these inclinations find expression in their behavior can vary pretty dramatically based on use. This is basically in line with the idea of temper and related concepts like risk-seeking/-aversion, the point here is more that when someone talks about about a person being a monster when they're drunk (or, conversely, being more fun or generous), there are typically inclinations in that direction already, they're just suppressed by conscience, anxiety, etc. They often don't specify this, because most popular discussion of morality and psychology isn't very precise, but I do think that mostly people are more concerning themselves with what people do than what they think or feel.

we talk a lot about ohhhh what if my calling is to be the greatest mammoth hunter ever and I'm wasting my talents in the modern era but we never think about what if Thog from 30,000 BCE was the only person ever born who could get a sub-7min Donkey Kong Country any%, and he never got the chance. what about thog

Malaria cells have plastids homologous to chloroplasts

"We now recognize that this large group of parasites had a photosynthetic ancestry and were converted into parasitism early in the evolution of animals."

What!

so this paper gives more context... ok first of all did you know that coral photosynthesize?? I didn't know that... but the way they do that is intracellular endosymbiotic uh protists or algae or whatever. The branch of parasites that malaria is from, plasmodium, their closest relatives seem to be these endosymbionts in coral. So we can guess that a long time ago the ancestors of plasmodium weren't parasitic, they were an endosymbiont in a photosynthesizing animal like coral

Ooh boy, serial endosymbiosis is really something.

(source: Patrick Keeling, 2004, The Number, Speed, and Impact of Plastid Endosymbioses in Eukaryotic Evolution)

So basically bacteria invented photosynthesis a bunch of times, but oxygenic photosynthesis, the kind that breaks water molecules to make oxygen (which is a lot easier than using e.g. hydrogen sulfide, but also requires a more complex apparatus, it's actually a really interesting adaptation) appeared exactly once, among Cyanobacteria. However, photosynthesis, especially the oxygenic kind, is a really really useful trait. The way most photosynthetic organisms on Earth accomplish it is by swallowing someone else who is already photosynthetic.

Eukaryotes -- i.e. all life on Earth with a nucleus in their cells, or if you will everything living that is not bacteria and such -- got their start in the first place by engulfing smaller oxygen-breathing bacteria that became mitochondria, so they (we) already have some good experience in that. A clade of Eukaryotes called Archaeplastida engulfed Cyanobacteria, turning them into plastids, granting themselves the power of photosynthesis. (This is primary endosymbiosis, as was the earlier origin of mitochondria. Both mitochondria and plastids are surrounded by two membranes -- their own old bacterial membrane, and the internal membrane of the host cell). From the first Archaeplastida grew red algae, green algae, and then the plants with roots and leaves we're familiar with. Some success!

However, the first Archaeplastida made themselves a target, just like Cyanobacteria had done. Not just for grazing, but for endosymbiosis too. At some point, members of several other clades of Eukaryotes -- Haptophyta, Cryptomonadida, and possibly the ancestors of a large and diverse group recorded as SAR -- engulfed unicellular red algae in turn. (This is secondary endosymbiosis. The resulting plastids have four membranes: the original bacterial membrane, the inner & outer membrane of the red alga, and the inner membrane of the new host.)

Other groups -- the flagellate Euglenids and the spiderweb-like Chlorarachniophyta -- did the same by engulfing unicellular green algae instead. (See my Tree of Life series for more info on all these groups.)

The SAR group did well: its photosynthetic lineges include diatoms, giant kelp, and the Dinoflagellates responsible for red tides. Other lineages are not photosynthetic, though, so either they lost their chloroplasts, or those other group did in fact acquire them independently. Ciliates like Paramecium, for example, lost or never had them. (Well, actually some Paramecium incorporate green algae, but not to the point of endosymbiosis.) Inside SAR we also find Apicomplexa like the agents of malaria and toxoplasmosis, which modified their chloroplast into a structure that can't do photosynthesis anymore but helps with other biochemical processes.

it doesn't end here. Dinoflagellates got creative. Some cast aside their red chloroplast and acquired a new one by engulfing a green alga instead. Others, multiple times, independently, engulfed diatoms or haptophytes. Tertiary endosymbiosis! A cyanobacterium inside a red alga inside a diatom inside a dinoflagellate!

... And meanwhile the armored amoeba Paulinella started all over again with primary endosymbiosis by engulfing a different Cyanobacterium, unrelated with all the rest of this story.

And now, just a couple weeks ago, the discovery was announced of the nitroplast, a chloroplast-like organelle that was also the result of endosymbiosis of a Cyanobacterium. This happened in a Haptophyte, and this time the point of the endosymbiosis does not seem to be photosynthesis but nitrogen fixation (i.e., breaking the infamously hardy molecules of nitrogen in the air to incorporate their atoms in a form easier to digest. Legumes can do that too, thanks to symbiont Cyanobacteria in their roots, but not so directly.)

For bonus weirdness points: the Haptophyte carrying the nitroplast has an armored stage of its life cycle that looks like a perfect dodecahedron:

Ah, but of course plenty of animals would find photosynthesis useful as well.

OP kindly mentions corals, many of whom have incorporated red algae in their tissues to provide some extra sugar. Many other low-metabolism animals did the same with green algae or cyaniobacteria. There's even a slug, Elysia chlorotica, that sucks chloroplasts from the algae it grazes, incorporates in its own tissues, and keeps them running long enough to do some photosynthesis on its own -- Elysia's body even looks like a leaf!

Indeed, George McGhee's Convergent Evolution on Earth (which admittedly might err a tad to the side of more convergence) lists 14 events of photosynthetic endosymbiosis among protozoa, and 19 among animals, including sponges, cnidarians such as corals, flatworms, sea squirts, clams, and slugs.

I think the biggest downside to having animal ears and a tail would be trying to mask your discomfort in public like imagine trying to play it cool in customer service but your tail keeps bristling

manager: you're not wagging enough

Gotta be honest, I think bidoof's law is extremely stupid

I guess the original idea was to poke fun at right-wing bloggers who would talk about the importance of conservative social values while being "shamelessly addicted to hentai," but most of the time I see it applied now is just as some sort of blanket "your bad opinion is bad because you run a porn blog"

In hindsight it should have probably been predictable that certain parts of this site would turn "these people are hypocrites" into "porn is bad and people who like it are bad and wrong".

Seems to be the fate of a lot of arguments about hypocrisy, honestly, perhaps because the former are easy to make and superficially appealing but don’t really cut very deep unless there’s some substantial position being criticized.

my economically sound and durable brutalist baby just dropped several tonnes of concrete on your neoclassical baby

booktok videos should be categorized as some sort of threat to public health