happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2020

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  • Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.


  • A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.





  • I try to cross-reference things and then look at the critical angles. Public media generally has higher editorial standards for me. I don’t trust right-wing sources or the New York Times because they lack editorial standards. State media I don’t trust for domestic issues, but while I don’t go to Al Jazeera for news about Qatar I trust their coverage of Palestine and France. I try to avoid sources that have an involved stake in the conflict, so something like Ukraine means no RT/Pravda but I’ll watch the primary footage coming off Telegram and then compare it to multiple countries’ coverage of it. I try to stay dialectical with all of it, so I’m cognizant of the history and material/social angles which create the issue and the biases of those covering it. I’ll read a socialist article but I don’t want to uncritically agree with news so that’s more supplemental unless the media hasn’t yet/won’t cover it.

    Otherwise I listen to a lot of podcasts that are leftist or left-liberal, keep a critical eye on social media coverage, and follow scientific journals/niche science websites that summarise those journal articles without editorialising.






  • Some kind of dementia. It’s a cancer of the soul which arbitrarily removes parts of you that you can’t even perceive the loss of. I had an MS patient whose vocal processing was reduced to the point that he could only say variations of “you fucking bitch”. He was totally bed-bound and dependent on a mostly female nursing staff for every single need. Most of those employees were burned out and he could only communicate to them using a wildly misogynistic slur. I’ve seen it reduce a famous AIDS researcher and a WW2 pilot to toddlers, others to cornered raccoons, for some it’s a nightmare they can never wake up from and they just spend all day/night reliving their worst memories. For a good 10% on the ward it just takes away their executive function and they can no longer control their worst impulses or recognise that they should.

    Cancer and strokes are a close second for more or less the same reason, but dementia is so existentially terrifying to me.