yeah, you definitely want to make a lighthearted remark

Haha, yea, I suppose you-

OH SHIT that is hilarious

“Are you fem, masc, or androgynous?”

I’m a lifelong Firefox user.

What’s in my pants? Internet privacy and decent browser customization.

"Voting doesnt work because not enough people in my country will vote for MY version of communism. We need a violent overthrow of the government to MAKE this happen"

@captainjonnitkessler im stealing your tags because youre so fucking right

The best that I can tell, it’s primarily about remaining Pure.

Obviously, the people who think they’re too leftist to vote aren’t monolithic, so no one reason fits all of them. But there’s a clear trend among many of them that they see voting for someone who has done things they personally find to be sufficiently Impure—or, in some cases, voting at all within an Impure system—as being an act that will somehow harm them.

So they stand firm in their conviction that they mustn’t vote, and instead talk about how great it will be when we finally have a Pure system, with only Pure candidates…

And this mindset is one of the things that has consistently fucked serious socialist governments once they do gain power, is the thing. (Another of the things is the CIA but that's another conversation.)

Because if you are unwilling to try to build institutions that can fluctuate and evolve and potentially be used in ways that aren't true to your vision, you not only have to institute tyranny, you have to build your entire system around maintaining your tyranny forever.

And once all your other goals hinge upon retaining power forever, they become subordinate to it.

At which point there is no realistic future to the Tyranny Of The Proletariat other than the tyranny of you personally. Which means you are going to 1) liquidate your own peasants or whatever similar scenario arises in your context and later 2) be overthrown and leave no useful institutional legacy, because you founded it all on virtue-by-fiat.

The self-cannibalism of ideological purity is never pretty, but in the context of government it's particularly bad.

Image descriptions:

End of descriptions.

I feel like I want to hand these people copies of "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett - one of the earliest books where he points out that the ultimate problem with a lot of People's Proletarian Revolutions is that ultimately the people in charge of them wind up realising they have the wrong proletariat. I mean, he also makes the same point in "Night Watch" as well, and I think it also gets raised in "Monstrous Regiment" too. But basically, it's a point Pterry made a number of times in a number of different books - the search for ultimate ideological purity and perfection is not going to change the world. The willingness to muck in and get your hands dirty, on the other hand, will.

Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”

― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

...Our friend was So. Damn. Wise.

radio is kind of wild really, the first thing we did after discovering an ethereal field that permeates the universe is infuse it with music.

Source

Source

So, I kinda wanted to hop in and subject this tumblr post to Peer Review, because while I definitely agree that there is a big problem in the US regarding poor media literacy, the study featured here is... not a good measurement, and these bullet points make the results seem worse than they are.

Another person in the notes linked an additional article that contained the full study, and these are the questions that were included in the study:

A couple of problems right off the bat. The first one that jumps out is #6: "The Earth is between 5,000 and 10,000 years old." In this study, the correct answer would be that this is a statement of fact, because it is, well, stated as a fact. And according to the paper in question:

That's lovely and all, but nowhere in this study does it say that the participants were informed that this is definition of "statement of fact" that the study was using. It's not exactly common knowledge that "statement of fact" and "fact" do not actually mean the same thing. A statement of fact is when someone says something that they believe is true. A fact is something that is true.

So, anyone who participated in this study who interpreted "statement of fact" to mean "fact" (and also wasn't a young-Earth conspiracy theorist) would have gotten this question wrong, because they know that Earth is much older than 10,000 years.

Another somewhat less obvious problem is in question 2, which the authors of the study address as such:

Yes, I agree that nobody could reasonably argue that a 95% loss isn't significant. However, unless the study specifically recruited participants who were extremely knowledgable about statistics relating to ISIS activity, the participants have no way of knowing that 95% is the amount in question. That "significant portion" could be anything!

Like, let's say that ISIS had lost 25% of its territory. That's a lot! That's over 10,000 square kilometers that were no longer under ISIS control. So one could argue that this is a significant portion. But also, that's only a fraction of their territory. ISIS still has control over the majority of the territory they'd had previously - three times as much as the amount they'd lost. So one could also argue that this is an insignifant portion.

If I had been a participant in this study, I would have marked this as a statement of opinion. And thus I would have become part of the 95% who apparently can't differentiate between fact and opinion.

But, I was not a study participant. So, who was? What does this study say about its participants?

Well, here's what the study says about it:

That's it. No information about how participants were recruited or invited to take the survey. Nothing about what quality assurance methods were used to make sure that participants were following instructions, or that computer error didn't interfere with the data.

Nothing about incentives given for the completion of the survey.

Oh, yes, that's something very important to note. You see, YouGov is not an academic research firm. It's a marketing research firm. It functions similarly to sites like Swagbucks or Survey Junkies. And this is how it markets itself to participants when you search for YouGov in Google:

That's exact marketing used by Swagbucks. I use Swagbucks. I'm a pretty active user, in fact. I answer surveys and play mobile games to collect points, then redeem them, usually for Wal-Mart gift cards so I can save on groceries. I know how sites like these work.

And I also know that when I just want to get a survey completed, I bullshit. I just click whichever multiple choice option is closest to my cursor until I'm done and can get the points.

Guess what else I do: I lie. Sometimes a survey is listed on the site that's worth a lot of points but is only looking for people of a certain demographic. And I take it anyway. I give them whatever info is needed to get my points and get those gift cards. I have had a grand total of one cup of coffee in my life and hated it. But whenever a survey asks me if I have ever bought a certain brand of coffee, I say yes, and I review it.

Oh yeah, that's another point: there is no demographic information given about this study's participants. We know that participants were at least asked for their age and political affiliation ("Multivariate models include controls for age and partisanship") but we, the readers, are never told what that spread turned out to be. We just have to take their word for it that YouGov's sampling methodology was sound.

If I had turned in this research paper for review, with this Methods section and this survey, my advisor would have slapped me.

So, what is my point? Why did I spend an hour writing this response to a tumblr post? Well, because the findings of this study may be bullshit, but this whole post brings to light another big problem in the world of media and journalism.

The University of Illinois published this sloppy-ass study that I would have been embarassed to hand in as a 10-point assignment. This survey made it through the internal review board, a process that I know from experience can take months and dozens of rounds of review. It was then peer reviewed by Harvard, the school that people point to as the epitome of academic prestige full of super geniuses, and added to their library. Then it was picked up by a Washington DC online newspaper and tweeted about by a member of the House of Representatives.

And finally, it was posted here on Tumblr, uncritically.

I don't know what percentage of Americans can't tell fact from opinion. And reading this study is not going to give me an accurate answer, because the study's design and conclusions the authors reached are a mess.

All I can tell you is that academic and journalistic instutions alike need to do a better job of reviewing and thinking critically about information they receive before they publish it to the world.

There’s something too on the nose about this… very often, if you’re presented with something that makes the vast majority of people seem incredibly, shockingly ignorant and stupid, there’s more going on with the “study”.

if we want the rewards of posting our fic we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of editing the damn thing

if we want the rewards of posting our fic we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of writing the damn thing

@iamthepulta

The Unapologetic Self as the Truest form of Self

[source]

THIS IS THE EXACT COMIC I WAS THINKING OF WHEN I MADE THIS BUT I COULDNT FIND IT! BLESS YOU!

universal language

Diane di Prima

ursula k. le guin, the lathe of heaven