1. The Devil’s Advocate
Time Stamp: 21:19
- When does Studying prevent Living Satanism?
- There is something to be said for getting together with other Satanists and talking about Satanists
- There is a fine line between this and developing a community
- There is also a fine line between this and creating an echo chamber
- I have discussed how Satanists online need to measure their successes and essentially ‘raise the bar’ on what success is, but you also have to get off the damn computer at some point to do that.
- Step away from Satanism as a religious study and focus on your actual life. Study not worship means more than just study,
- You can find yourself worshipping the religion itself rather than yourself
- Study the religion to understand the tools it provides for your use, then get out in the real world and use those tools!
2. Infernal Informant
Time Stamp: 40:47
- The Last Children of Down Syndrome
- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/
- Fält-Hansen, a 54-year-old schoolteacher, heads Landsforeningen Downs Syndrom, or the National Down Syndrome Association, in Denmark, and she herself has an 18-year-old son, Karl Emil, with Down syndrome.
- Once, Fält-Hansen remembers, it was a couple who had waited for their prenatal screening to come back normal before announcing the pregnancy to friends and family. “We wanted to wait,” they’d told their loved ones, “because if it had Down syndrome, we would have had an abortion.” They called Fält-Hansen after their daughter was born—with slanted eyes, a flattened nose, and, most unmistakable, the extra copy of chromosome 21 that defines Down syndrome. They were afraid their friends and family would now think they didn’t love their daughter—so heavy are the moral judgments that accompany wanting or not wanting to bring a child with a disability into the world.
- in 2004, Denmark became one of the first countries in the world to offer prenatal Down syndrome screening to every pregnant woman, regardless of age or other risk factors. Nearly all expecting mothers choose to take the test; of those who get a Down syndrome diagnosis, more than 95 percent choose to abort.
- Denmark is not on its surface particularly hostile to disability. People with Down syndrome are entitled to health care, education, even money for the special shoes that fit their wider, more flexible feet. If you ask Danes about the syndrome, they’re likely to bring up Morten and Peter, two friends with Down syndrome who starred in popular TV programs where they cracked jokes and dissected soccer games. Yet a gulf seems to separate the publicly expressed attitudes and private decisions. Since universal screening was introduced, the number of children born with Down syndrome has fallen sharply. In 2019, only 18 were born in the entire country. (About 6,000 children with Down syndrome are born in the U.S. each year.)
- Fält-Hansen is in the strange position of leading an organization likely to have fewer and fewer new members. The goal of her conversations with expecting parents, she says, is not to sway them against abortion; she fully supports a woman’s right to choose. These conversations are meant to fill in the texture of daily life missing both from the well-meaning cliché that “people with Down syndrome are always happy” and from the litany of possible symptoms provided by doctors upon diagnosis: intellectual disability, low muscle tone, heart defects, gastrointestinal defects, immune disorders, arthritis, obesity, leukemia, dementia.
- These parents come to Fält-Hansen because they are faced with a choice—one made possible by technology that peers at the DNA of unborn children. Down syndrome is frequently called the “canary in the coal mine” for selective reproduction. It was one of the first genetic conditions to be routinely screened for in utero, and it remains the most morally troubling because it is among the least severe. It is very much compatible with life—even a long, happy life.
- The forces of scientific progress are now marching toward ever more testing to detect ever more genetic conditions. Recent advances in genetics provoke anxieties about a future where parents choose what kind of child to have, or not have. But that hypothetical future is already here. It’s been here for an entire generation.
- The decisions parents make after prenatal testing are private and individual ones. But when the decisions so overwhelmingly swing one way—to abort—it does seem to reflect something more: an entire society’s judgment about the lives of people with Down syndrome.
- In wealthy countries, it seems to be at once the best and the worst time for Down syndrome. Better health care has more than doubled life expectancy. Better access to education means most children with Down syndrome will learn to read and write. Few people speak publicly about wanting to “eliminate” Down syndrome. Yet individual choices are adding up to something very close to that.
- The medical field has also been grappling with its ability to offer this power. “If no one with Down syndrome had ever existed or ever would exist—is that a terrible thing? I don’t know,” says Laura Hercher, a genetic counselor and the director of student research at Sarah Lawrence College. If you take the health complications linked to Down syndrome, such as increased likelihood of early-onset Alzheimer’s, leukemia, and heart defects, she told me, “I don’t think anyone would argue that those are good things.”
- But she went on. “If our world didn’t have people with special needs and these vulnerabilities,” she asked, “would we be missing a part of our humanity?”
- That word, eugenics, today evokes images that are specific and heinous: forced sterilization of the “feebleminded” in early-20th-century America, which in turn inspired the racial hygiene of the Nazis, who gassed or otherwise killed tens of thousands of people with disabilities, many of them children. But eugenics was once a mainstream scientific pursuit, and eugenicists believed that they were bettering humanity. Denmark, too, drew inspiration from the U.S., and it passed a sterilization law in 1929. Over the next 21 years, 5,940 people were sterilized in Denmark, the majority because they were “mentally retarded.” Those who resisted sterilization were threatened with institutionalization.
- David Wasserman, a bioethicist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health who, along with his collaborator Adrienne Asch, has written some of the most pointed critiques of selective abortion. (Asch died in 2013.) They argued that prenatal testing has the effect of reducing an unborn child to a single aspect—Down syndrome, for example—and making parents judge the child’s life on that alone. Wasserman told me he didn’t think that most parents who make these decisions are seeking perfection. Rather, he said, “there’s profound risk aversion.”
- “On the one hand I saw the problems. And on the other hand he was perfect.” It took four months for him to get diagnosed with Down syndrome. He is 6 now, and he cannot speak. It frustrates him, she said. He fights with his brother and sister. He bites because he cannot express himself. “This has just been so many times, and you never feel safe.” Her experience is not representative of all children with Down syndrome; lack of impulse control is common, but violence is not. Her point, though, was that the image of a happy-go-lucky child so often featured in the media is not always representative either. She wouldn’t have chosen this life: “We would have asked for an abortion if we knew.”
- Of course, she said, “it’s shameful if I say these things.” She loves her child, because how can a mother not? “But you love a person that hits you, bites you? If you have a husband that bites you, you can say goodbye … but if you have a child that hits you, you can’t do anything. You can’t just say, ‘I don’t want to be in a relationship.’ Because it’s your child.” To have a child is to begin a relationship that you cannot sever. It is supposed to be unconditional, which is perhaps what most troubles us about selective abortion—it’s an admission that the relationship can in fact be conditional.
3. Creature Feature
Time Stamp: 1:13:19
- Creative Challenges
- Creative muscles atrophy if not exercised
- When you are given a new creative challenge it can be intimidating
- Knowing that others trust in your skill can be terrifying
- Self doubt or inferiority complex
- I was presented with a design challenge
- I didn’t agree with the premise
- The time I had to complete it was minimal
- I had many concepts with multiple executions
- Challenging yourself can build confidence and a sense of self worth