reblog for easter
forget april fools day its almost time for the best video on this entire fuckin planet
sunglasses. no sun. it’s cloudy: overcast.
Holiday tradition
@lank-sextburg / lank-sextburg.tumblr.com
reblog for easter
forget april fools day its almost time for the best video on this entire fuckin planet
sunglasses. no sun. it’s cloudy: overcast.
Holiday tradition
"Sex work is real work, unlike being a landlord"
Spotted in a public bathroom in California
It's a date! 🍔✨
Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way
If you spend any significant amount of time studying any social science or people-related policy, you’ll quickly run into the old adage “you will excel at what you measure”. This adage is a warning.
In order to mark progress in any area, we need a way to measure it. So we develop systems to measure complex social systems and behave accordingly. If you want to measure how effectively children are being educated, you can, for example, decide on what they should know by a given age, test them on that knowledge, and grade them in accordance to how well they do on the tests. A higher grade means a more successful student, a better teacher, a better school. Then you can tinker with what you’re testing as necessary, and with teaching methods and soforth to see how it affects scores on the tests.
Except, if you do this, then you’ve defined successful education as the ability to get high grades. You invite cheating (on the student, teacher and even school level), you invite teaching to the test rather than for general comprehension and ability, you invite boiling down the experience of education to test scores. And, of course, you invite massively increasing the inaccuracies caused by some people simply being better at taking tests than others. Someone with low to moderate comprehension who’s good at tests might get a higher grade than someone who understands the material but has anxiety or is unable to properly intuit the meaning of vague test questions. Grades can go up and up and up, while education consistency and quality falls.
This is, as anyone who’s worked in a school or sends their children to school knows, a known problem. ‘Grading systems cause huge problems in education” is NOT by any means a revolutionary and controversial statement. Over time, grading systems have been changed to favour testing comprehension and skill demonstrations, Individual Learning Plans and testing accommodations have become very popular to give a more accurate idea of people’s abilities, and soforth. A good half of my teaching degree was about compensating for the problems in this system. But you can’t patch up all the holes, and the pressure from people taking letter grades way too seriously – parents, school boards, funding systems, those looking to hire teachers – are always going to cause problems, make teaching to the test a matter of survival. We measure grades, so that is what we excel at.
The same problem exists in economics. Most countries measure their health via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is basically a measure of how much money is swilling around in there and it’s an AWFUL yardstick. A country full of sick, desperate people going into massive medical debt has a higher GDP than an identical country not facing a health crisis, for instance. But it is the dominant model, so it’s what investors look at, it’s what other countries look at, it’s what voters look at. It’s what you must excel at, to be considered to have a ‘good’ economy. Other models exist, and are often proposed as a better alternative, but if one of those were dominant, new problems would exist – we’d excel at what they measure, and drop in what the GDP measures, and cause new economic issues. If you boil a system down to measurements, you will excel at making those measurements go up.
You should never, ever let yourself fall into the trap of believing that they tell you anything useful about how the system is doing.
Morality and justice are social technology. They’re a bunch of rules and instincts that both evolution and cultural education have given us to allow us to operate in societies. They’re integral to societies in the same way that math is; you need math complex enough to measure the grain, you need morality complex enough to measure the social harmony. People pretend they’re more than that, but they aren’t. “Good” and “bad” are concepts as real as “millionaire” and “straight-A student”, and nothing more.
In the vast, vast majority of societies out there, the end goal is essentially the same – to minimise harm to the populace. They want everyone to have as much safety and comfort as possible. Most disagreements are about the relative value of different individuals (is one race, religion or culture more important than another? Is one sex more important than another? Is a king more important than a slave?), or about methodology (is it better for everyone to have to follow strict social norms, or for everyone to be free to express themselves how they choose; which creates more safety and harmony? What social norms are best? How much control should one have over one’s property, or one’s animals, or one’s children? When somebody transgresses, what is the appropriate system for judging and metering out discipline? What is the appropriate sort of discipline?). People disagree radically on both relative individual value and on methodology, but the general goal is the same. Morality and justice are social technology, tools to be used. Law and social consequence is how their power is enacted.
People often forget this. And that is very, very dangerous.
People will decide on what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, isolate it from the system, and proceed to excel at what they measure. They’ll decide that ‘good people’ use certain language and have certain values and ‘bad people’ use other language and do bad things, they’ll look at harmful power dynamics and decide that the world is full of ‘oppressors’ (can be ignored) and ‘oppressed’ (must be supported), ‘abusers’ (should be mocked and attacked) and ‘abused’ (should be believed and coddled), and stumble blindly forward like my robovac with a dirty sensor bumping into every wall in their way. They’ll see a complex social situation and instead of going ‘what’s the best way to reduce harm?’, immediately try to decide who involved is more oppressed and get their answer from that. They’ll see people use language they don’t like and decide that person must have nothing of value to add to a conversation, because they’re a bad person.
Today, I saw someone muse that the fact that American football causes huge amounts of brain damage that compounds over many years might contribute to why USA footballers seem to keep doing random unhinged things. Somebody else immediately attacked them because rape and domestic abuse is common among footballers (footballers being the attackers), so by suggesting a physical reason for unstable behaviour, this person was making excuses for rape. You might notice that this response has absolutely nothing to do with protecting people from rape or domestic abuse, and absolutely everything to do with making sure nobody might accidentally sympathise with a ‘bad person’ by suggesting that brain changes change behaviour. A focus on minimising harm would want to explore this, because removing risk factors for causing rapists means less rapists. Less rape is the goal. ‘Rape is evil’ is the tool used to achieve it. But this person got distracted by the tool of measurement, making sure that the buck stops there.
Yesterday, I saw a post about police violence, pointing out ‘police shouldn’t kill guilty people either’. This was a response to how people often protest police killing innocent people, which is definitely bad, but the point is that the police shouldn’t be killing anyone outside of strict self defense. The justice system is what meters out punishment, not the personal discretion of a state-sponsored gang with too many combat toys. The role of the police to to prevent violence and capture wrongdoers, not deal out extrajudicial executions. I’m sure I don’t have to explain in detail why this is so fucking important, but one set of tags on the posts made the distinction “except for pedophiles and rapists”. I have never seen anybody miss the point of a post so badly. Clearly, this person had once again gotten distracted by the system of measurement – pedophiles and rapists are evil people who do evil things, therefore they should be eliminated as expediently as possible – without considering the effect on the system. No, police randomly shooting rapists does not make a better society. If you support the death penalty for rape, that’s a whole arse different question.
These kneejerk reactions don’t just happen with pedophiles and rapists (although they are very effective for it, which is why dangerous and unsavoury elements like to call the groups they hate pedophiles). I’ve also seen people get upset at historical demonstrations of queer unity and support because the people in them called each other words they don’t like and get all distracted by minutae on who’s ‘allowed’ to ‘reclaim’ what words, preferring to condemn gay men calling lesbians ‘muffdivers’ despite the massive personal risk and great benefit of the demonstration. I’ve seen people quibble over what groups of disabled people experience more ableism than others, and which queer subcommunities are more oppressed, in order to determine who the good guy in a complex situation is or who deserves their support more. I’ve seen people slip all the minorities they belong to into an argument like they’re laying out the cards to summon Exodia (because most oppressed person is most deserving of support person and therefore most correct person), I’ve seen people distract from arguments they’re having in order to try to trap the other person into saying something that can be interpreted as sexist or racist so they can show that their opponent is the Bad Person (and therefore they’re the good person and therefore correct in the argument), I’ve seen people look at two people with conflicting needs (such as an autistic person who verbally stims and one who reacts badly to too much sound) and stop to decide which one is oppressing the other one to determine which one is being ableist.
This is all fucking bullshit. It’s meaningless nonsense. The only reason any of this matters is in how it relates to causing actual real world harm. I’d rather be called a tranny bitch by someone who votes in support of my healthcare than the most polite and up-to-date language by someone who votes against it. I’d rather know about risk factors that make someone more likely to be an abuser or rapist than shy away from such things because I don’t want to risk thinking of them as anything other than an Unknowable Evil. I don’t fucking care what Problematic ™ views someone holds about a cartoon and I don’t care who’s the Most Pure or the Most Oppressed or who used to say slurs online when they were fifteen if they’re behaving appropriately now. None of that fucking matters, and it’s not justification for harassing or hurting people.
Your sense of justice and morality are social tools. Sharpen them, clean them, look after them. And use them to build with purpose, rather than blindly hacking at whatever’s in front of you. Or you’ll just make a mess.
Tolkien is having his first ever egg. It’s. Not going well.
what’s funniest about the pacific rim scientists is like. when newt geiszler says he’s a scientist he means an old-timey 1910s entomologist wearing khaki shorts and a comically oversized pair of binoculars traipsing through the jungle capturing endangered species of butterfly and murmuring “egads!! fascinating…..” and scribbling it in his journal. when hermann gottlieb is being a scientist it’s literally the fucking manhattan project. tortured chainsmoking physicist. pawn of a war. repressed homosexual all his life. gets executed for being a communist. And they have to do each other’s peer review
“Obviously ‘bihet’ offends a lot of bisexuals, so we need to come up with a better term for bisexuals in m/f relationships.”
How about… and hear me out… this may sound crazy…. but you… continue to call us bisexual… because (and I realize this gets confusing for you people so read this next part slowly) it turns out we continue to be bisexual regardless of who we’re dating.
Okay, this shit gets me all heated up. I’m just a cisgay dude up in here, but I have Some Opinions about this nonsense.
Bisexual people in relationships with folks of the other gender are not only themselves still bisexual (I’m really ashamed of a bunch of all that this shit even needs to be said, like c’mon), but their relationships are queer.
Yes, I just said that straight people can be involved in queer relationships without they themselves being queer.
The reason for this is simple: folks who are in relationships with queer people will always have to deal with their partner’s marginalization impacting their relationship. Always. Even if their bisexual partner chooses to be entirely stealth about their queerness (and that’s their right, by gods, fight me about it), their relationship is still impacted by that very choice existing. It’s a facet heterosexual relationships never have to negotiate.
Frankly, bisexual folks have to deal with active marginalization from multiple angles: heterocentrist and homocentrist. And in case I actually have to say this aloud? We should not be fucking marginalizing our own, y’all. That makes you a bad person, and you should feel bad.
To sum up: Bisexual folks are queer as hell. Straight folks can be in queer relationships without themselves ever being queer. And FFS please stop harassing bi- and pan-folks already, man. It’s 2018. Find hobbies that are not shitty.
I love this addition to my post so much thank you.
Cheetah calls for his sibling. (via)
man the state of history education is really in the toilet huh. do i need to tell you that:
1. jews were racialized as ‘other’, not european, for pretty much all of the time they were in europe
2. jews in north africa were killed during the holocaust
3. much of europe was not horrified at all by the culmination of millennia of antisemitism
4. you should be embarrassed to showcase how little you know with your face and name attached
73% of the Dutch Jewish population were killed during the war. Do you know what the Dutch government did afterwards?
That's not all the Dutch government did - they also forced Holocaust survivors to pay mortgages, back taxes, and utility bills for all their old properties they hadn't been using while they were in death camps (even if they never got the properties back).
OP never learned history and I fully expect is too stupid to start now.
Until the unification of the Kingdom of Italy the Jews of Rome were the personal property of the Pope.
Jewish emancipation wasn't passed in Spain until 1978. There are Tumblr users who remember 1978.
Fuck revisionist history... If you pull up the cobblestone in any city in Europe you're liable to find Hebrew writing, because they thought "the Jews are all going to be dead, who would complain if we used the headstones from their cemetery?" Our skeletons still bedeck university specimen shelves, and our skulls and bones are still used by school theatres.
Silos's pharmacy.
In the ancient Abbey of Saint Dominic of Silos, the old pharmacy has been preserved to these days. In old times, it had a botanic garden, a pharmaceutical laboratory, a very interesting library and hundreds of earthenware pots for potions and remedies.
More information about the Abbey here (EN):
The monastery dates back to the Visigothic period of the 7th century. In the 10th century, the abbey was called San Sebastián de Silos, but acquired its current name when Dominic of Silos was entrusted to renovate the abbey by Fernando the Great, King of Castile and León. Dominic had been prior of the Monasteries of San Millán de la Cogolla before being driven out with two of his fellow monks by King García Sánchez III of Navarre, for opposing the king's intention to annex the monastery's lands.
Can an artist in the fandom PLEASE draw two mash characters in the “I think we’re gonna have to kill the guy” “damn” meme PLEASE I am begging
M*A*S*H Season 7, Episode 23: “Preventative Medicine”
Bless you this is wonderful
the butch/femme scene of 1990s san francisco by chloe sherman
Just finished reading Maus for the first time and this part really spoke to me.
by @yanpaintsnails on Instagram
losing it at this photo of the counts puppet not being used. literally he looks like hes just taking a nap on set or something
ITS SUCH A FUCKING HONOUR I COUNT WORDS IN POSTS